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59 Five Excursus Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa I was born in South Africa, and it was in that shaping context, as a child of German Jewish refugees who had come to the shores of that country during the 1930s, that some of the sensibilities associated with the German Jewish legacy were transmitted to me.1 Over the years, of course, my understanding of the meaning of that legacy changed and deepened as it became more conscious, and the task of this essay will be to delineate briefly that evolution. But from a child’s emotional point of view, to the extent that one can distinguish the specifically German Jewish components from the general experience of growing up Jewish, it was initially a rather embarrassing inheritance. It was, no doubt, my parents’ German accent, at once comfortingly familiar yet clearly foreign, which first alerted me to the “alienness” of my background. To the outside world, or so I believed, the fact of German foreignness was especially unforgivable in the years following World War II. In the first few weeks of primary school, when asked where my parents came from, I murmured “Australia.” How could a child, even around 1950, acknowledge German origins, admit that in some way he had been the mortal enemy? Of course, already at that age I intuited the difference well enough but it was well-nigh impossible to articulate that, no, my parents were not the enemy but victims, and that defining them as archetypal Germans was an obscene irony. There was, in fact, a double bind in such a predicament. For if from a child’s point of view being Jewish did not exempt one from the stigma of Germanness, very often in the eyes of our conventionally bigoted, lowermiddle -class teachers, Germanness was little more than a synonym for Jewishness. This was brought traumatically home to me when a particularly sadistic manual-training teacher descended upon me and scolded me for crude behavior (what exactly I had done remains a mystery to this day). He was fully aware that I was Jewish—in South Africa a finely tuned 60 (Con)Fusions of Identity—Germans and Jews ethnic radar is indispensable—and it was this animus which informed his question: “Where do your parents come from?” Upon hearing the answer he proclaimed loudly for all to hear: “That accounts for your manners.” At other times, the anti-Semitic intent was less veiled and the antiGerman , anti-Jewish thrust explicitly fused. One day, in the middle of a science class, the teacher settled his gaze directly on me and asked why I believed World War II had been fought. Without waiting for a reply, he himself provided the enlightening answer: “Because of the Jews, Aschheim , because of the Jews.” Incidents like this pushed me ever deeper into the Zionist Youth Movement (in South Africa, unlike the United States, a vibrant “counter-institution” expressive of an oppositional Jewish youth culture) and at the same time into an increasingly critical stance toward the overall system of racial injustice in South Africa. It has been suggested that this sensitivity was influenced by the cultivated liberal-humanism of German Jewish Bildung. Does this hold? Only, I think, in subtle, perhaps even subliminal ways. For that legacy (forged during a century-long struggle for emancipation) was largely the product and ongoing activity of the Jewish intelligentsia, while people like my parents, the overwhelming majority of the approximately 6,000 German Jews who immigrated to South Africa in the 1930s, came from the initially almost destitute, commercial, non-intellectual classes. Presumably the refugee German Jewish intellectual elite carried out a voluntary selection process, rejecting even the possibility of going to what they probably conceived as the remote kulturlos jungles of Africa. The manifestations of German Jewish Bildungsideologie in South Africa accordingly bore little resemblance to the cultural and intellectual productivity or the moral and critical acuity which, according to the recent work of David Sorkin (The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840, 1987) and George L. Mosse (German Jews beyond Judaism, 1985), marked the tradition at its best. When Bildung did manifest itself in South Africa, it did so usually in other, more familiar ways: as the cultivating complement to successful commerce, the refining twin of Jewish Besitz (property). This is not meant disparagingly. As they rose up the economic ladder, some German Jews did indeed become pioneering patrons and practitioners of music, theater, and...

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