Germany: Ambivalence Amid Plenty

"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...