The Limits of Brotherhood: Jews and the Reconstruction of "Race" in Early Postwar Germany

After Hitler’s defeat in 1945, West Germany embarked on the path towards liberal democracy. At the same time, racism persisted as a powerful source of identity building and policy making. Historians like Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, and Lauren Stokes have demonstrated that the racialization of, and discrimination against, Black occupation children, ‘guest workers,’ Sinti and Roma, immigrants, and refugees remained a permanent feature of the Federal Republic. However, this important body of scholarship has not yet explored how Germany’s postwar Jewish community fit into that picture. Formerly known as the country’s largest minority group, the Holocaust decimated it to only 30,000 members. Despite the small number of German Jews, their presence was highly important for the country as it seemingly testified to the latter’s democratic progress.

My paper investigates the role Jews played in the “racial reconstruction” (Heide Fehrenbach) of postwar Germany. It focuses on the ideas and the activism of the two leading institutions of postwar German Jewry, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the weekly Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. According to my argument, Jews figured prominently in discourses and policies of ‘race’ in early postwar Germany. On the one hand, Jewish leaders understood themselves as advocates for other minorities and spearheaded efforts to stigmatize and outlaw all forms of racial discrimination. On the other hand, they contributed to a liberal discourse of ‘race’ that conserved notions of racial ‘difference’ and excluded the experiences and claims of other minority populations. This paper thus broadens our understanding of Jewish communal politics in post-1945 German history and reveals its ambivalent position in the Federal Republic’s experience of grappling with the past and present of racial injustice.