Germany: Ambivalence Amid Plenty

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East German politicians of Jewish descent have been assailed during demonstrations, among them Gregor Gysi, chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the Communist Party. GYSI IS NOT A GERMAN! and OUT WITH THE JEW GYSI! read some banners at one rally. Earlier this year, vandals defaced the grave of the playwright Bertolt Brecht with graffiti that read JEWISH PIG and OUT WITH THE JEWS. Brecht was a Marxist, though not a Jew. Says Michael Czollek of the Jewish Cultural Union in East Berlin: "That attack is evidence of an anti-Semitism that considers anything that's seen to be somehow un-German to be Jewish."

Until 1933, Jews could be unequivocal about being German. Says Michel Friedman, 34, a Frankfurt lawyer: "Jews were so convinced that they were part of Germany that they failed to see the danger signs." Today they live in a country with two geographies -- one a visible landscape of prosperity; the other a terrain traversed by way of a metaphysical atlas that lies embedded in memory. Obstacles protrude, preventing a seamless match with the world as others see it. While no one expects the terrors of the past to be repeated, the scars are present. Yet some see signs of renewal, of a sense of place, of belonging. Living in two worlds, they look for reconciliation.