Jewish Ghosts in Germany

It is often said that history is written by the victors. In contemporary remembering of the fate of Jews in mid-twentieth-century Europe, however, we see in action a phenomenon widespread in the formation of modern collective consciousness: history is written by the victims—and their ghosts. In this article I will review several literary works written from a Jewish perspective on the (im)possibility of German reconciliation with the past, then explore recent attempts by young Germans to effect such reconciliation. In the process, I hope to show some of the ways contemporary Jews and Germans envision the past and approach it.

In a 1946 report, one American occupation official with particular acuity wrote:

The Jews now in Germany, both native and foreign, are the corpus delicti, the accusers who haunt the Germans and will continue to haunt them until the thousands or millions of individual Germans who had a personal part in the extermination of the Jews are brought to justice....As long as the Germans lack the moral courage to accept the consequences of the Nazi crimes against the Jews, they will seek to banish the accuser and they will denounce him as a disturber of their peace. ¹

But the Jewish haunting of Germans requires neither actual Jews nor personally responsible (former) Nazis: "[E]ndings that are not over is what haunting is about." ² Ruth Wisse, discussing some 40 years later Poland's postwar record of anti-Jewish attitudes and acts, ended by hearkening to the continued life of the dead in national memory: "Some Poles today acknowledge the Jews as their phantom limb, that amputated part of the body that leaves an irritating illusion of its presence. The Jews, however, are no longer there." ³

Around the black hole of collective trauma, whose power warps the very laws of nature, the line between illusion and reality, between presence and absence, blurs beyond recognition. Ghostly haunting, that is, involves precisely "that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present." ⁴ Further troubling the waters of (self-)reflection, Poland experienced a resurgence of Jews and Judaism in the years shortly after Wisse's article, and a similar resurgence has been transpiring in reunited Germany. The haunting presence of an amputated limb is infinitely compounded, and confounding, then, when this limb, consisting of a minority population of half a million people (many millions, if one considers the whole continent), was amputated as the remedy prescribed by the dominant majority itself and when this limb now, against all political diagnosis, shows unmistakable signs of growing back.

With or without this still quite tentative regeneration, many young Christian Germans and Poles (and other Europeans) lament the amputation, feel guilt-ridden over the loss, romanticize the missing entity. Hence irritation marks only one of many ways in which the collective consciousness and conscience relates to the former limb amputated from the national body. Wisse, in Poland for a precedent-setting Jewish conference and tour, noted how the Jewish visitors' "evenings were burdened by stories of encounters with present occupants who did or did not express regret and compassion, who did or did not invite one in for a cup of tea." ⁵ When the ghostly limb voices its own needs—or rather, "gesticulates, signals, and sometimes mimics the unspeakable as it shines for both the remembered and the forgotten"⁶— as ghosts so often do, the conflict of memory and desires can only result in complications that far transcend the sphere of political medicine. Haunted by its own haunting, the personal and national psyches of today's Germans face somewhat of a crisis. Have Jewish ghosts arisen with grave demands? If so, what do they want? Should they, can they be met with denial, exorcism, psychoanalysis?

Literary treatments of the Holocaust have raised the issue of Jewish ghosts (pre-)occupying the souls of their oppressors in several works. This haunting both is and is...