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216 4 Germany on Their Minds I N A 1 9 5 3 opinion piece in the Jewish Spectator, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin spewed vitriol at the “current tin-pan alley hit song” “Auf Wiedersehn!” and the Americans who enjoyed it. Since “popular songs must appeal to the sentiment of the masses by means of subconscious identification,” she pondered why the songwriter had chosen for this lilting piece of music “a German refrain? And why,” she asked, when “one probes further, is that German refrain so popular?” Weiss-Romarin detected sinister forces at work in an American culture which depicted “German characters . . . as such woeful and sympathy-deserving ‘innocent’ victims, unwilling instruments of the bad, bad Nazis, who are represented as if they had no connection at all with the ‘good’ Germans.”1 Weiss-Rosmarin linked the song’s mass appeal to an ongoing campaign , orchestrated by the U.S. government and postwar West Germany, to rehabilitate Germany’s image, to convince the world that the latter had no connection to Hitler’s Third Reich. The Jews of America, WeissRosmarin predicted, would not be hoodwinked by this public relations ploy. She contrasted them with those Americans who enjoyed the song’s catchy tune. Jews had been “gifted with a long and faithful memory.” Their neighbors might fall for “Auf Wiedersehn” and by efforts of the German government to promote tourism to “Beautiful Germany.” Jews would never “forget-and-forgive the concentration camps and the gas chambers, the Belsens and the Auschwitzes, the mass-graves which hold the remains of those buried alive, and the Jewish children asphyxiated by poison gas.” Jews considered Germany “a country that still reeks with the blood of six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Germans.” Who, she asked, could “expect Jewish tourists to come for ‘pleasant travel’ to the slaughter house of six millions of their sons and daughters” but “a people with a Nazi mentality”? Weiss-Rosmarin packed a punch in her words: “There is no ‘Auf Wiedersehn’ for Jews as far as Germans and Germany are concerned. We remember and shall always remember what this modern Amalek has done.” Germany on Their Minds 217 The magazine editor may have overestimated the significance of the silly song, but what she said and how she said it reflected American Jews’ engagement with Germany, the German people, the German language, and, indeed, nearly anything “German.” To them, Germany stood exposed as the murderer of one-third of their people, as bearing responsibility for the destruction of Europe’s Jews and their communities. As American Jews confronted Germany in the postwar era, they kept that brutal truth in the forefront of their consciousness and placed it prominently in their public rhetoric. They never hesitated to label Germany as the culprit and asserted directly and indirectly that by keeping alive and exposed to public scrutiny the fact of Germany’s culpability, they fulfilled a memorial obligation to their kin, literal and metaphoric, who had gone to their deaths at the hands of the Germans. Every time it held up to public gaze the image of Germany as the wrongdoer and as a postwar nation that needed to admit its sins and rid itself of its Nazi past, American Jewry saw itself as carrying out its sacred task to remember and recall the six million. Its words about Germany and its efforts to get other Americans to listen functioned as monuments to the victims of the catastrophe, no less, but different, than did physical markers, liturgies of mourning, and dedicated books. By confronting Germany, the Jews of America not only expressed their anger and their need for justice, but they spoke for those who could no longer speak. Historians of later generations would not see it this way. To Peter Novick, the very opposite kind of rhetoric and political action characterized American Jewry’s stance toward postwar Germany. “In matters having to do with Germany,” he wrote, “there was a virtual taboo on mention of the Holocaust,” except in “private and in-house Jewish discourse.” As he saw it, only the “Jewish left” invoked the Holocaust, thereby forcing the rest of American Jewry to remain mute when it came to casting blame on the culprit nation responsible for the systematic annihilation of so many Jews.2 The vast compendium of words and actions undertaken by American Jews tell a very different history. In their communal world, and as they turned to their non-Jewish neighbors and the American...

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