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"Healed Biographies"? Jewish Remigration and Indemnification for National Socialist Injustice
... The decision of the Bonn parliament to grant financial help to remigrants in the order of 6000 Marks per person led to a further wave of immigration in 1956. 7 Yet what was unusual about Jewish economic life in the Federal Republic was not what Zionist critics regularly insinuated: that Jews in Germany were bad Jews because they only had money on their mind. ...
The essay will address the history of West German Jewry using the concept of guilt as its guiding theme. Jews in West Germany had a bad conscience on account of living in the “land of the murderers.” This bad conscience not only distinguished them from other Jewish communities, it also explains much of what characterized West German Jewry from 1945 to 1989: its particular economic structure; its especially close ties to Israel; its preoccupation with democratization; its power arrangements; and its communal life. The essay will address these issues, and trace a development that led from a close-knit, ideologically homogeneous group to one that became ever more pluralistic in the 1970s and 1980s.