Germany: Ambivalence Amid Plenty

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"Without Jews, there is no German identity," writes the West German historian Michael Wolffsohn, "without the Germans, no Jewish one." One of the paradoxical results of the Holocaust is that Jews and Germans are forever tied to each other in linkages in which guilt, recrimination, memory and forgetfulness convulse and contend.

For most of the Jews who survived the concentration camps of Europe -- as well as for many who lived abroad -- the solution to trauma was distance from Germany and things German. How could they live and work in a country that had sought their very destruction? How could they allow themselves and their children to be German when that word had become their very antithesis?

Yet Jews remain in Germany today. Their number is minuscule, their presence barely visible -- certainly nothing like the vibrant and bustling pre-Hitler communities centered in Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities that accounted for nearly 1% of the population before 1933. Those who have chosen to live in Germany explain their presence in several ways: a continuing sense of a shared culture, a mission to prod German conscience and memory, and business opportunities.

Most Jews residing in Germany are refugees or emigres from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, who see life in West Berlin and the Federal Republic as a vast improvement over their previous existence. Many are baffled that anyone should think their presence worthy of comment. "Living as a Jew in Germany is , just like living in America," says Alex Kozulin, 31, a Russian-born pianist who came to West Berlin via Israel twelve years ago. "I don't feel I have any enemies." Heiner Ulmer, 40, the son of Polish concentration-camp survivors who settled in Bamberg after the war, is more emphatic. Says the high school teacher: "I'm a German. I was born here, I studied here, all my friends are German."

Jews who lived in Germany before the war form a minority of the 28,000 who make the Federal Republic their home. One of them is Alfred Moses, 70, a semi- retired West Berlin watchmaker who left Europe for Israel in late 1948 after living through the horror of the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Finding life in the Middle East intolerable, he and his wife Inge returned to Germany in 1954. In Berlin the couple's friends are all Christians. Says Inge: "We do not go to synagogue, and there are few Jews, if any, in our neighborhood." She adds, "We're treated normally, and we can live like other people."

Living a pleasant life, however, does not erase ambivalence about the past. The Moseses, for example, are concerned that Germans gloss over guilt for the Hitler years and the Holocaust by focusing on their own suffering during World War II. The feeling transcends the generations. Says Ariel Karmeli, 25, born in Frankfurt to Jewish parents hailing from Syria and Iran: "My culture is German. Frankfurt is my city. Germany is my country. But here I must constantly justify myself to others. When I get on a bus and see an old man, I ask myself, 'What did he do in World War II?' If he knew I was a Jew, what would he do now?" Convinced that Jews cannot live normal lives in Germany, Karmeli has decided to emigrate to Israel. Says his friend Deni Kranz, 25, born in Cologne to Israeli parents: "Here you are exotic as a Jew, like the way mangoes are exotic to East Germans. I am a mango here."