Menashe Kadishman's installation, Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves), in the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photograph: iMaculate

Yascha Mounk

Farrar, Straus and Girous, $26.

"Ii souls within a single body"—that is how the Israeli journalist and author Amos Elon described the tension of beingness Jewish and German language in his 2003 book The Compassion of It All: A Portrait of the German language-Jewish Epoch 1743–1933. Merely the challenge did non end with the Holocaust. There are still Jews in Frg, more now than at any fourth dimension since the finish of World War Ii.

Who are they, German Jews or Jewish Germans? The question has been oftentimes analyzed and debated. Even as the "new Jew" and the "new Frg" are proclaimed and defined, the intractable duality remains.

In his new book Stranger in my Own Country: A Jewish Family unit in Mod Frg, Yascha Mounk explores the duality via his own identity—Jewish and born in Germany. Mounk traces his family unit's dispersal from Poland after Władysław Gomułka's anti-Semitic Communist regime took power. They went to America, Sweden, Israel, and Federal republic of germany, where Mounk himself grew up. He describes how his mother Ala came to West Germany and reluctantly obtained High german citizenship through a first husband before Mounk's birth. In 1982 Mounk inherited her citizenship at birth, thanks to a 1975 law that for the first time enabled matrilineal descent. Eventually, having been treated as a Jew autonomously, never fully German despite his citizenship and residence from nativity, he rejected his Germanness and moved to the United States.

Mounk is hardly the beginning German Jew to feel like an outsider in his own postwar home. In that location is the 1979 anthology Strangers in One'southward Own Land: Jews in the Federal Republic, co-edited by the provocative German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder. The following year, the German Israeli author Lea Fleischmann wrote This is Not My State. Judged by its cover, Mounk's volume may seem redundant or anachronistic.

But Mounk's breach is of his particular moment, representative of the varied experience of Jewishness that emerged later on the wall came down. This is non the new Jew of postwar Germany, sorting through the rubble, but the new Jew in an era of immigration, reintegration, vigilant memorialization, and a demonstrative national quest for normalcy. Germany is considered a paragon of formalized historical reckoning, compared favorably with her neighbors Austria and Poland and sometimes with the Usa' engagement (or lack thereof) with its own particular atrocities, peculiarly slavery and its persisting effects. In schoolhouse, Germans are extensively and repeatedly educated on the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Museums and monuments, such as the Topography of Terror and The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, punctuate the long list of sites to be visited in Berlin.

Mounk, for a time, inhabited the space between institutionalized confrontation with the past and wider cultural conceptions of difference, belonging, and identity. Weaving memoir and history, anecdotal clarification and political-cultural analysis, he describes his own experience of the High german-Jewish duality, ultimately opting for an identity complimentary from both classifications.

• • •

Growing up in several "reasonably idyllic places" across Frg—never, notably, in Berlin, simply in cities such as Munich, Freiburg, and Karlsruhe—Mounk experienced the seesaw of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, neither of which leaves much "room . . . for Jews to be regarded every bit 'normal' people subject to the ups and downs of mortal men and women," according to Jeffrey Thou. Peck, author of Being Jewish in the New Germany (2005). The erstwhile is often more than subtle than violence or hate speech communication and the latter more pervasive and complex than the Jew-less European Klezmer craze of the 1980s and '90s detailed in Ruth Ellen Gruber's Virtually Jewish (2002).

At one moment, Mounk'southward fifth-grade teacher asks "Protestant or Catholic?"and the course is in stitches when he responds, "Well, I guess I'm sort of Jewish." The next, an acquaintance at a party describes Woody Allen as creepy and so bends over backward to defend Allen's unabridged oeuvre when Mounk arrives to the conversation, despite Mounk'due south balls that he has no horse in the race. There'southward Klaus the neo-Nazi, a regular at xiv-twelvemonth-old Mounk'southward chess club who becomes sheepish later on discovering his opponent'southward Jewishness. And then there's Markus, whose guilt-induced conversion to Judaism and obvious attempts at friendship unnerve Mounk.

Mounk's alienation is representative of the varied experience of Jewishness that emerged after the wall came downward.

A coming-of-historic period heavily peppered with such encounters makes connection with non-Jewish Germans fraught, cocky-identification uncomfortably imposed. "For me personally," Mounk writes, "information technology wasn't primarily violence or hatred that made me feel that I would never exist a German. It was benevolence. . . . The consequence of their pity and their virtue was to leave both of us with the sense that I couldn't perchance take anything in common with them." As a issue, "the simplest interaction betwixt Jew and Gentile [can] degenerate into a politically correct one-act of errors."

In addition to careful philo-Semitism, Mounk identifies "resentment against the country's supposed obsession with the past—a resentment that is voiced especially loudly by younger Germans." During a contempo trip to Berlin, I met a xx-4-twelvemonth-old non-Jewish German who attributes this, at least in part, to years of history grade without much discussion of personal or familial connection to the events studied.

"What you actually do not accost is that there probably is something like a 3rd-generation trauma," Christian told me. Christian has worked for the local office of the American Jewish Committeeand, within his community, discussion of this trauma is common. But in school, he says, for the virtually part "you don't even talk most the question of collective and individual guilt." He identifies "latent anti-Semitism" among many contemporary Germans, often unconscious and built-in of a rebellion against guilt that they perceive equally forced upon them.

Mounk sees this urge to be done with historical reckoning equally a "fast-spreading motion" that became increasingly mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s. Its goal is to attain a "finish line" demarcating a new phase in Deutschland's ties to its history. Although the intent to recognize Jews as regular people is laudable, Mounk argues that this finish line motility has instead cast High german Jews as extras "in the state's increasingly aggressive attempt to prove that it has finally left the past backside."

Mounk looks to idealization of the 1968 protests in lodge to make sense of the end line movement. Citing Hans Kundnani's Utopia or Auschwitz: Frg'south 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (2009), Mounk argues that the '68ers were fueled by anger and unease concerning their parents' generation and past a simplistic reading of Frankfurt School theory that linked commercialism to fascism. To the '68ers, this meant that the Federal Commonwealth was a Nazi government. Their anxiety around making a "make clean suspension" from the past perversely drove the German left's increasing violence.

The concept of the finish line was publicized past historian Ernst Nolte in his 1986 essay "The Past That Will Not Pass," which, in plough, triggered the Historikerstreit, a yr-long debate between historians and public intellectuals on the bailiwick. This was followed in 1998 past a controversial speech communication from the novelist Martin Walser, who declared, "Auschwitz is not suited to become a routine threat . . . or a moral cudgel." Soon after, opinion polls revealed that 63 percent of Germans were in favor of "drawing a cease line nether discussions near the persecution of Jews."

Mounk was sixteen at the fourth dimension of Walser's speech and remembers watching it on TV with his granddad Leon, the human being who'd had him memorize Jewish High german poet Heinrich Heine's work in his youth. Mounk realized that cease-line resentment underlay the philo-Semitism he often encountered. "It'south not that my classmates grew hostile," he writes. "Nor did they starting time hurling anti-Semitic slurs at me. What they did was subtler, though, over time, equally alienating: they came to run across me equally a foreign and slightly mysterious outsider who wasn't bad, necessarily, merely who too most definitely wasn't really a role of their community."

• • •

Some 15,000 High german Jews survived the Holocaust, eight,000 of them in Berlin. Later on the state of war and before Israel was founded in 1948, displaced persons, many of them Jewish, found temporary residence in displaced persons camps built by the Allies. Some stayed.

Non long after the wall roughshod, the federal authorities passed the 1991 Quota Refugee Law whereby it agreed to have Jewish migrants from the quondam Soviet Matrimony. What followed was an influx of more than 200,000 people of Jewish background, mostly Russian-speaking. This massive change in the numbers and demographics frames any discussion of Jewishness in Deutschland today, especially in Berlin. The capital's Jewish population grew from almost 6,000 in 1990 to an estimated 50,000 by 2008. Co-ordinate to a recent report by American announcer Toby Axelrod, who has lived in Berlin since 1997, in Federal republic of germany today there are "more than 240,000 people of Jewish groundwork," shut to a third of the Jewish population when the Nazis came to power.

"Do you retrieve that my son, two generations after the war, should feel as guilty towards Jews as I do?"

"Today'southward younger generations will not forget, but they are non dwelling on the by," Axelrod writes, reporting that religiously and culturally, the Holocaust serves less and less as a definitive theme in Jewish life in Frg. "With all its neuroses, its ambivalences and lurking threats, Germany is home."

Not abode for all, Mounk might say. Only perhaps in Berlin, with the largest and most diverse Jewish community in Germany, there exists a freer and more than varied Jewish experience than the one he reports. The capital has 11,500 registered members of the federally recognized and funded community, the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Approximately twice every bit many Jews unaffiliated with the official community also alive in Berlin. Many of these are young and are among the x–xv,000 Israelis that take flooded the upper-case letter in contempo years. Growth, fragmentation, and plurality characterize communities within and beyond the Fundamental Council, which itself struggles to take the diversity of Jewish identification.

To demonstrate this living variety, last spring Berlin'southward Jewish Museum unveiled the exhibition "The Whole Truth . . . everything you always wanted to know about Jews," which included the controversial "Jew in a box" installation that sat a Jewish volunteer on a platform bearing the caption, "Are at that place still Jews in Germany?" Whether yous find the conceit offensive or applaud the self-disquisitional engagement with the complicated nature of Jewish-Gentile relations, a showcased Jew answering visitors' questions certainly forces i to consider issues of actuality, identification, and representation.

Bill, a 27-year-old Jewish American who'south lived in Berlin for four years and has no plans to get out, saturday in the box 3 times. "On some level [Germans] know Jews alive in the world," he told me, "but they don't really come across Judaism as a living, breathing, evolving civilisation with real people. Information technology's either the Holocaust or State of israel, neither of which I'm so thrilled being represented or identified past."

Linda, 29, who was born and raised in Cologne, sat in the box only once. She figured since she'd been answering Germans' questions near Judaism her whole life, she might every bit well do it officially. "Information technology was always a problem for us in High german schools to be a kind of Jewish ambassador for the entire customs," she told me. Most visitors approached her tentatively.

When ane German language man asked his 4-yr-old son to sit down side by side to her on the bench, Linda knew things were most to get interesting. "And then, Linda, practice you lot recall that my son, two generations afterward the state of war, should feel as guilty towards Jews as I practice?" the man asked. "This was not a question I was prepared for," Linda recalled. "I asked, 'What do you lot mean, why would you experience guilty?' and he said, 'The media tries to tell me day by day that we Germans still need to feel this.'"

But when Linda asked what he knew about Jews or Judaism, the homo was unable to give much information beyond stereotypes about ruling fiscal classes and undeserving High german guilt. "He but didn't want to leave," Linda said, describing their 20-minute conversation, in which she felt the homo used her as a sort of shrink to parse the guilt around his own family unit's interest in the Holocaust, which he admitted and apologized for. "I tin can't give you this approval," Linda told him, "I think you should try to get clean with your past and not with me." He agreed, only, Linda said, "information technology seemed like he was kind of relieved after talking to me."

Linda's grandparents, who'd fled to Bolivia and and then to Israel during and after the state of war, returned to Germany in the 1950s. "My smashing grandmother said that she want[ed] to go abode." Like her grandmother, Linda tried living in Israel. She also spent a yr in the United states. But she, too, "wanted to come up home" so she moved to Berlin. "That's why I feel, unlike possibly other Jews of the community, a very strong connection, possibly not to the German people, but to the country," Linda said. "I really never struggled with the feeling of not existence function of this identify."

• • •

One'southward ain sense of Jewish identity, similar other aspects of self-formulation, tin can exist sculpted by internal feelings and actions—adhering to Jewish cultural norms, observing the holidays and rituals, assertive in a higher power—as much every bit it tin be influenced by outward perception—the repeated feel of beingness treated as Someone Who Is Jewish.

While Mounk was in Federal republic of germany, it was the latter that shaped his Jewishness, too every bit his Germanness. "My family'due south Jewish identity has never been strong," Mounk writes in a New York Times op-ed anticipating the release of his volume. "I had neither a bris nor a bar mitzvah. When I was young, my mother gave me Christmas presents then that I wouldn't feel left out. Nevertheless, every bit I grew older, I felt more and more than Jewish—and less and less German."

At the heart of Mounk's alienation is the historic formulation of a national identity inextricably tied to ethnic Germanness and Christianity. Inside this purity-based notion of German identity, there is no room for diverseness or multiple allegiance. Leitkultur, or "leading civilization," a bourgeois concept introduced in the late 1990s, yet frames national political discussions most immigration, integration, and multiculturalism. "Germany's debate about the past is ultimately nearly much more than than retention politics, or even relations between Jews and Gentiles," Mounk writes, "it is nearly the policies Deutschland should pursue in the present."

 Mounk'south call for Germans to rethink their conceptions of who is and is not German is not only upstanding advice just also economic.

In large part, what he has in mind are policies and attitudes with respect to immigration—especially Turkish. Invited legally as contract workers in the 1960s during Germany'south Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") and afforded permanent residency in response to corporate lobbying, people of Turkish or Arab descent—likewise as Tunisian, Moroccan, South Korean—even those who are High german citizens, are nevertheless idea of every bit guests. Words such equally Gasterbeiter ("guestworker") and Auslander ("foreigner") are commonly used to describe them. While laws have inverse, conceptions of identity are more rigid: Germanness is still associated with ethnicity, religion, and monoculture rather than borough membership.

At a time when Deutschland's population is decreasing and anti-clearing lobbyists are advocating "zero net migration," Mounk'due south call for Germans to rethink their conceptions of who is and is not German language is not merely upstanding communication but also economic. Rapid depopulation volition shrink the economy, make the welfare state unaffordable, and escalate social tensions. "Germany's prosperity, the fate of immigrants already in the country, as well every bit—final and probably least—the long-term hereafter of Germany's Jews now depends on" a new vision of German identity, Mounk argues.

Mounk besides draws a parallel betwixt the feel of Jews in contemporary Germany and that of black Americans. He is not naïve near the historical, cultural, and experiential differences (phenotypic being the most obvious), but he focuses instead on broad similarities of philo-exoticism and liberal guilt to link his experience every bit a Jew in Germany with "the state of affairs of heart-class African-Americans in predominantly white, cocky-consciously politically right circles." But while finish-line resentment may resemble the pernicious notion that slavery'south furnishings are over—both speak to an ambitious desire to, impossibly, separate history from the nowadays—the comparison doesn't quite line up.

Mounk considers the white appropriation of hip-hop culture analogous to philo-Semitism and cites "the false tones of self-conscious admiration for African-American civilization." Merely hip-hop, originally created in black and chocolate-brown communities, has altered mainstream popular American civilization—like German Leitkultur, alsowhite, Christian and invested in exclusion—in a procedure very unlike from recent philo-Semitic curiosity or two millennia of Jewish-German mutual influence. And while the German-Jewish relation is a celebrated dichotomy, issues of race in America are more than circuitous, since other groups of color inflect the black-white dichotomy. But whatever oversimplification about race on Mounk's role takes place within a much broader context in which he is self-witting virtually the limits of his noesis.

Apart from this critique, there is the event of the rose-colored spectacles through which he views America, specifically New York City, his current habitation when he's not in Boston or Italian republic, where his mother now lives. Information technology reflects the gap between German language and American understandings of multiculturalism. What Germany calls multiculturalism is a mail service–Word War Two phenomenon for the most part, and it remains at the center of active political debates. The Usa, by contrast, was built struggling with its multiplicity. It continues to practise so—clumsily, violently, and nether the encompass of euphemisms. In the The states, "multiculturalism" and "diversity" have become buzzwords with which the establishment disingenuously champions the melting pot, a metaphor Mounk actually invokes. The terms are frequently meaningless propaganda; one finds "post-racial" not far behind. Peradventure more masterfully shrouded in conservative concepts of "respectability" or "family values," our own national sense of Leitkultur—of who is and who is not deserving of civic membership—is live and well.

This is non to say that the differences Mounk experiences as a Jew in Deutschland and in New York are insignificant. Thanks to his move, Mounk discovers freedom in identity. New York allows him to realize, unexpectedly, that being Jewish is not specially important to him. "New York has given me the same liberty it has afforded generations of immigrants: the freedom to be true to myself," Mounk writes in the Times. "In an age of identity politics, we assume that this must mean the freedom to proclaim one'south identity. Just, for me, it has simply every bit much to do with the liberty to shed an identity to which I'd long been reduced." His Jewish identity, built up from the outside in Germany, is immune to recede from within in New York.

Mounk's story is ane of globalized identity-formation: of multinational allegiance and dispersal of home, where a sense of belonging can be establish and allegiance chosen, not imposed. Mounk could not find this sense of belonging in Federal republic of germany, simply he allows that things have greatly changed there, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and others accept institute what he could not. "Smaller [German language] cities are seeing their 'new' Jewish communities dwindling," Axelrod writes. "Merely there is definitely a much livelier, more diverse and 'in-your-face' Jewish life in Frg's major population centres today than in 1989." Mounk would have to concord.

If this tendency is to keep, and if German citizens who are not Christian or ethnically German are to stay, the country must take a hard look at what it ways to be German. This will involve non simply a superficial tolerance or conditional inclusion, just rather an uncomfortable grappling with and credence of multiple identities inside a national civilisation e'er in flux. Germans will have to acknowledge multiple allegiances on the part of any i private. This necessitates not only changes in private interactions, but in state policy. Ane such change is at present underway, equally public schools accept begun to offer an official curriculum in Islam, in an attempt to better integrate the country's large Muslim minority. Another much-needed education reform could eliminate the tracking of children as young as ten, some jump for university, others for clerical work, still others for manual and technical jobs. The tracking is less a measurement of potential than an assured disadvantage for children from less-educated, lower-income backgrounds, many of them not ethnically German language.

"For existent integration," the Turkish-German scholar Zafer Şenocak writes, "one must cultivate, in encounters with others, a sense for multiplicity and contradiction. In the process one would have to analyze sources of knowledge across preconceived opinions and identities." We would do well to heed these words on both sides of the ocean.