Living with the Holocaust

Germany is at a crossroads now, faced with significant challenges to its post-Holocaust consensus and stability. The re-publication of Mein Kampf, now that the book is out of copyright, and the events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, in which some 1,500 male immigrants took part in sexual assault on hundreds of women, have highlighted this fact. The difficulties should not be underestimated.

Germany lives in the shadow of its Nazi past and the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. It can never forget, for one thing because, despite the Holocaust, there are still Jews in Germany, perhaps as many as 200,000 now, including over 100,000 registered with the official Jewish communities, and the German state supports their activities. Many are Russian Jews who have arrived since the late 1980s, many of them neither culturally nor religiously particularly Jewish. Added to that are thousands of Israelis, many of them in Berlin, most of them Jewish. They have newspapers and radio stations in German, Hebrew and Russian, they are Orthodox, liberal, atheist and even Hasidic.

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