Anti-Semitism in a United Germany

Abstract

In contrast to the main immigrant groups living in Germany such as the Turks and minorities who are clearly ‘atypical’ in terms of their appearance, the small minority of Jews (around 43 000 individuals) is inconspicuous in everyday life. The Jews are also socially and legally fully integrated and have citizen status by law. Whenever there are attacks on Jewish facilities or anti-semitic opinions are voiced, this is motivated by the special German-Jewish history and by old anti-semitic traditions and not by recent social conflicts. The Jews are primarily represented in the public eye as the victims of the Holocaust, whereas other victim groups such as gypsies, foreign forced labour or Russian prisoners of war have never achieved this status. On the one hand, this has meant that Jews have always represented their interests to a wider audience than other persecuted peoples or immigrant minorities who have settled in Germany more recently. On the other hand, anti-semitism has become a taboo subject in public. The topic of ‘the Jews’ is ‘somehow unsettling’ and is avoided to the extreme, especially as this subject is always associated with unwelcome reminders about National Socialism.¹