Shades of Red in the GDR: On the Identities of Jewish Communist Exiles after 1945

Abstract

Discourse on Jewish life in the German Democratic Republic has often offered a clichéd portrayal of a society in which Jewishness was subsumed into the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, leaving Jews as either self-hating (Stalinist) Jews or as citizens forced to deny their Jewish origins. In particular, Cold War narratives have often differentiated between Jewish communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, and thus seen afterwards as more loyal, and those who were in exile in the West, and thus more likely to be suspected of disloyalty. This paper focuses on non-Soviet exiles and their descendants to explore the diversity of Jewish identity, politics and culture in the GDR, ranging from assimilationist communist identity to explicit engagement with Jewish traditions and even the Jewish religion. Surveying through the generations from pre-Nazi communist activism to the GDR-born children of such activists, it finds a diversity that belies monochrome portrayals of GDR life, while also establishing that, far from being mere passive instruments in the service of an SED-led (neo-)Stalinist society, Jews in the GDR were agents in the establishing of their own multi-faceted identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Exile
• Identity
• Jews
• GDR
• Communists
• Antisemitism
• Anti-fascism

Helmut Eschwege was born in Hannover in 1913 into an Orthodox Jewish family and was schooled in a Talmud Torah school in Hamburg, though at an early age he rejected religion in favour of socialism. In 1929 he joined the SPD and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a paramilitary organisation for the defence of democracy in the Weimar Republic. He remained a member until both were banned after the Nazis came to power in 1933.¹ In 1934 Eschwege emigrated via Denmark to Estonia and in 1937 to Palestine, where he joined the Communist Party of Palestine, and from 1942 he served in the British Army. As a Jewish communist Eschwege rejected Zionism and was highly critical of Jewish settler attitudes to Arabs. He made no secret of his desire to leave Palestine.²

In 1946 Eschwege returned to Germany via Prague and Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). He joined the SED and, through contacts, played a significant part in transferring Jewish book collections from Prague to Dresden, books which in 1952 were acquired by the GDR’s Museum für Deutsche Geschichte in Berlin, and Eschwege moved to work there, while he remained living in Dresden. Though trained as a ‘Kaufmann’, Eschwege became a historian of Jewish and German-Jewish themes. The GDR authorities made his research difficult, however; in 1953 he resigned his post in the museum before he could be dismissed, and in 1958 he was expelled from the SED. Nevertheless, he built up a significant international reputation as an historian, and was involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue in the GDR. He died in 1992 in Dresden, having been a founding member of the East German Social Democratic Party in early 1990.

Eschwege’s difficulties with the GDR authorities derived largely from his stance on the question of national identity, and he faced sanction for, for example, reading Yiddish newspapers. This Jewish exile from the Nazis had rejected the Zionist movement and left Palestine before the creation of Israel, though he maintained contacts with close family and friends there. From 1985–89 he even functioned as an informant (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) for the Stasi.³ Yet throughout his time in the GDR he maintained that his nationality was not ‘German’ but ‘Jewish’. He even tried, in 1951, to use Stalin, the Große Enzyklopädie der UdSSR and Marxist theoreticians such as Rennap,⁴ Gallacher and Otto Heller on the nationalities question to make his point about the Jews as a nation, but he was rebuffed and regretted that in a moment of weakness he gave in and signed his nationality as ‘German’.⁵

Eschwege was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jewish exiles who returned to eastern Germany after the defeat of Nazism, and in some respects his views outlined above are those of a Querdenker. Jewish exiles who on their return to Germany went to the Soviet Zone/GDR came from all over the world. Their experiences were diverse, their political convictions broadly of the left, their identities multi-faceted such that collectively a single definition such as ‘Jewish’ or, indeed, ‘communist’ does little justice to the diversity of those identities. Moreover, many of them brought children with them, or subsequently had children, who in turn developed a sense of loyalty to the GDR that persisted in spite of the antisemitic attitudes that at times informed not only GDR discourse and official attitudes but also political actions. The word that comes closest to an umbrella definition of all such people is ‘anti-fascist’, a word much mis-used and abused but which was capable of provoking a great degree of loyalty in what was a deeply flawed society. This paper focusses on Jewish communists whose place of exile was other than in the Soviet Union and who, as a consequence of their place of exile, were more susceptible to being distrusted in the GDR.

It is sometimes forgotten, in light of the repression of dissent that came to be at the core of the SED regime’s approach to governing, that many of those who went to the Soviet Zone and later the GDR, Jews and non-Jews alike, did so out of a commitment to build what they saw as a better, socialist future rooted in egalitarian principles that they viewed as missing in the capitalist states that had fought Nazism. Some had been communist functionaries who were well aware of, and sometimes themselves role-players in, the evils of Stalinism, as played out in the Soviet show trials or the grain fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s. They had fought Nazism but also fought other socialists in dark times, such as during the Spanish Civil War. They could treat horrendous acts as necessary evil in the building of a better future. Too often, their methods and language had echoes of the totalitarian approach of the Nazis, echoes that were later to be found in some of the language used in criticism of Israel in the GDR.⁶ Many more, however, were not part of such machinations.

Too often, Western discourse on the GDR has strayed into the simplistic and continued to be rooted in Cold War attitudes long after the Cold War had ended. At its most basic, such discourse suggested that life in the West was colourful and diverse, while life in the GDR was grey, boring and utterly conformist. That sentiment even manifested itself in unexpected places: the map-making company Falk, which produced well-known segmented city maps, issued a street map of Berlin in the late 1980s in which West Berlin was pink, with other colours used for some of its landmarks, while East Berlin was a dull grey. Of course, there was an element of truth in such portrayals; West Berlin and West Germany certainly allowed for a greater degree of non-conformism and diversity than did the GDR. In respect of the GDR’s Jewish population and, in particular, the exiles who went there after 1945, however, this trope needs to be challenged as an over-simplification.

Michael Wolffsohn is a conservative German nationalist historian from a Jewish background whose rhetorical flourishes on the subject of the GDR and, in particular, Jews in the GDR, allow for little appreciation of diversity in his subjects.⁷ His very well researched study of Jews in the GDR is full of colourful language and name-calling of those whose politics he opposes.⁸ He is right to call out the long-standing misuse of ‘anti-fascism’ as a motif in the GDR’s self-representation and self-justification, what Ralph Giordano called ‘der verordnete Antifaschismus’.⁹ Wolffsohn and others have also written about some of the more shameful antisemitic episodes in the GDR’s history, including the show trials of 1953.¹⁰ Yet his definition of Jews as ‘für die DDR ein Instrument’ is deeply problematic, since it strips Jews of agency in their own lives in the GDR.¹¹ Particularly in respect of Jewish exiles who went to the GDR after 1945, nothing could be further from the truth.

What seems clear in respect of such Jewish exiles is that the decision to return to Germany was rarely rooted in a sense of Jewish identity. Most were communists of Jewish birth or descent, but few expressed their Jewish identity in the vehement national terms used by Eschwege. Some tried to keep their own Jewish identity far from any political discourse that they were involved in. Others made no attempt to disguise their Jewishness, and some refused outright to allow their Jewishness to be instrumentalized in anti-Israeli or any other propaganda. Some, in the early post-war years, even wrote tracts on approaches to antisemitism. Though many of the Jewish communist returnees faced periodic discrimination in the GDR, there appears to be no simple pattern to this.

One such was the Marxist economist Siegbert Kahn (1909–76). Born into a Jewish family in Berlin, he joined the KPD at an early age and was arrested several times in 1933 before being sentenced to 31 months in prison for ‘Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat’. On his release he worked in the Berlin Jewish Community before leaving for Czechoslovakia in 1938. From there he went to England, was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940–41, and was active in the KPD in Great Britain until his return to Germany in 1946.¹² In Germany he became a leading SED functionary, serving from 1949–65 as director of the Deutsches Wirtschaftsinstitut, which he co-founded with fellow exile Jürgen Kuczynski.

In 1948 Kahn published a short overview of the development of antisemitism in Germany.¹³ In it, he drew on standard communist interpretations of antisemitism, quoting sources including Lenin, Stalin, Mehring and a wartime text by ‘I. Rennap’, to assert that: ‘Die “Juden” schlechthin bilden überhaupt keine Einheit, weder eine politische noch eine soziale. Sie sind lediglich eine religiöse Gemeinschaft (und auch in diesem Rahmen keineswegs gleichartig)’.¹⁴ Yet in the same section, the book having been completed and published after the foundation of the State of Israel, which he references, he also argues: ‘Die Juden werden in Zukunft das Recht haben, zu wählen zwischen der vorbehaltlosen und völligen Assimilation, was nicht unbedingt Aufgeben ihrer Religion bedeutet, oder einer eigenen nationalen Entwicklung’.¹⁵ At this time in 1948 the Soviets were trying to woo the new state of Israel, and it is entirely possible to see this ambiguity in that context. Support for Israel and Jewish organisations, coupled with his having been in exile in the West, appears to have been part of the reason for the persecution of a non-Jew, Paul Merker, in the early 1950s,¹⁶ yet there is nothing in Kahn’s biography to suggest that he suffered on account of such writings.

The same cannot quite be said of his co-conspirator in the founding of the Deutsches Wirtschaftsinstitut, the economist and economic historian Jürgen Kuczynski (1904–97). Born in Wuppertal to a wealthy Jewish family, Kuczynski joined the KPD in 1930 after returning to Germany from a three-year stint as a researcher in the USA. In 1936 he went to England, a committed Stalinist. In 1943 he moved to the US and returned to Germany in 1945 as a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army. Later that year he moved to the Soviet Zone, became a professor of economic history at Berlin University in 1946, and remained close to the SED leadership throughout his career, despite being subjected to accusations of revisionism in 1957–59.¹⁷ In his second autobiography he notes that when a book by him on a social science topic was published in the Soviet Zone in 1946 (he does not give the title), the editor-in-chief remarked, as he handed Kuczynski a copy: ‘Eigentlich war ich gegen die Veröffentlichung. Mir scheint es taktisch falsch, als erstes das Buch eines jüdischen Autors herauszubringen’.¹⁸ Kuczynski, ever the loyal SED supporter, waited until after the demise of the GDR to publish this nugget.

Not so, however, another episode in which he was confronted with antisemitism. Though he spoke only mediocre Russian, the Soviets in 1947 insisted that he become President of the new Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft. By the 1980s this éminence grise of intellectual leadership in the GDR enjoyed a certain Narrenfreiheit, which he used to good effect in a rather quirky series of reflections on politics and life, published in 1983.¹⁹ In it, he recounted that in 1950 he was removed from the role as President at Soviet insistence, which he attributed to periodic Stalinist antisemitism, ‘Haltungen übrigens, die von unserer Parteiführung niemals auch nur in der allerkleinsten Andeutung übernommen wurden’.²⁰ The evidence might lead to a legitimate question as to whether this statement about the SED leadership was required in order to slip in the reference to Stalinist antisemitism.

That a whole series of German-Jewish political exiles returned to Germany after 1945 and went to the Soviet Zone has been well documented.²¹ Some are better known than others, especially those who held high political office such as Albert Norden, Alexander Abusch, Hermann Axen, though even they were subjected to suspicion and temporary demotions in the early 1950s. One lesser-known figure whose biography is similar to that of Abusch, because he was in exile in both France and Mexico, is Erich Jungmann.

Jungmann (1907–86) was born into a working-class Jewish family in Reichenberg, Saxony. He joined the KPD in 1928, was elected to the Reichstag in November 1932, arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated in 1934 to the Soviet Union. He was active in communist circles in Amsterdam (1935–37) and Paris (1937–39), interned in Vichy (1939–42) and fled to Mexico (1942–46). He returned to Germany and, after a brief sojourn in Frankfurt/Oder was sent to the British Zone as a KPD functionary. Recalled to the GDR in 1951 he was caught up in the charges that derived from the Slanský Trial in Czechoslovakia (Fieldism, Titoism, Trotskyism) but, after a brief period in internal exile in Karl-Marx-Stadt returned to Berlin, rose through the ranks and was secretly rehabilitated in 1956. He served as Secretary of the KPD Central Committee, and retired in 1976 after almost five years as Director of Radio Berlin International.²² According to archival material found by Wolffsohn’s team of researchers, Jungmann secured his own safety by incriminating Alexander Abusch, among others.²³ Jungmann’s Jewishness was almost incidental in his own life, yet clearly not to the SED in the early 1950s. This communist who had been subjected to discrimination on account of his Jewish origins could have left the GDR at any time after 1954 until 1961. Yet he didn’t. His communist convictions apparently sat too deep.

Not all stayed, however. Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) was born into a Jewish family in Lublin and brought up in Wuppertal. He joined the SPD in 1927 and switched to the KPD in 1928. He trained as a lawyer, was an active communist, and served in the political leadership of the Jewish Workers’ Cultural Association in Wuppertal. He went to France in 1933, was interned in 1939 but fled to Mexico in 1941, via Marseille. In exile he was, on the instructions of the KPD, a member of the German-Jewish refugee organisation Menorah.²⁴ He returned to Germany in 1947 and joined both the SED and the Berlin Jewish Community. By 1950 this had become politically untenable, not least because he had risen to become the Chief of Wilhelm Pieck’s Office. He was assigned other senior duties until, in December 1952 in the wake of the Slansky Trial in Prague, he fled the GDR and settled once again in Mexico, where he worked as a jurist and academic. According to his son he did not consider moving to Israel partly because of his wife’s security fears but also because of his ‘disapproval of the treatment of the Arab population as second-class citizens’.²⁵ Zuckermann remained a communist and died in Mexico in 1985. In 1981 he had had a friendly meeting with Honecker in the GDR embassy in Mexico City. Zuckermann’s Jewishness was too important to him to tolerate the GDR’s antisemitism, yet he somehow retained friendly feelings toward the GDR thirty years after he fled.

Many of the Jewish writers who went to the GDR after 1945 have been considered extensively elsewhere. Most of them wrote about Jewish themes at least some of the time, though with varying degrees of openness. Anna Seghers’ first post-war novel, Die Toten bleiben jung,²⁶ though it puts antisemitic sentiments into the mouths of several negative characters, is not a novel on a Jewish theme, unlike some of her short stories, such as ‘Post ins Gelobte Land’, published in 1946.²⁷ It is not coincidental that the latter story was written in Mexiko, i.e. before Seghers return to Germany in 1947 and, though it was not included in a GDR Werkausgabe of 1951–53,²⁸ it certainly appeared in other short story collections.²⁹ Her 1924 PhD thesis on Jews in the works of Rembrandt was not published until 1981, just two years before her death.³⁰ Throughout her time in the GDR Seghers did not foreground Jewish themes in her writing. She served as President of the GDR Writers’ Union 1952–78 and rarely criticised the GDR publicly, not even when her publisher, Walter Janka, was put on trial in 1957, even though her international fame as a writer may have allowed her more freedoms than were accorded many others. Indeed, according to Janka Seghers implicated ‘mit dubiosen Aussagen’ Paul Merker as a ‘Noel Field-Agent’ in 1951.³¹

Arguably, only Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) had a similar international renown among the Jewish writers who went to the GDR. Unlike Seghers and most of those discussed here, Zweig had not been a communist before the Nazi period. His writings, both literary and theoretical, often focussed on Jewish themes, and he had Zionist sympathies.³² In 1933 Zweig fled Germany, arriving in Haifa in 1934 via Czechoslovakia and France. Yet he soon came into conflict with Zionists who opposed any use of German or Yiddish, and the offices of the journal Orient, where he worked, were bombed, forcing the journal to close. Faced with such narrow nationalism Zweig aligned himself with socialist movements as his own financial position became untenable, and in 1948 he left Palestine/Israel for the Soviet Zone of Germany. There he was feted, was a member of the Volkskammer (1949–67), President of the Academy of Arts (1950–53), and was awarded several prizes. Externally, Zweig defended the GDR, internally, he criticised it, as documented in several Stasi reports.³³ He also continued to write novels on Jewish themes, including one, Traum ist teuer, in which some Zionists could be seen as allies, albeit in World War II.³⁴ And finally, in June 1967, Zweig’s very public pièce de résistance was his refusal to sign a document devised by Albert Norden during the Six-Day War, an ‘Erklärung von DDR-Bürgern jüdischer Herkunft zur israelischen Aggression’, which was published in Neues Deutschland on 9 June. Every GDR citizen could see and note the absence of Zweig’s name.³⁵

All of those considered thus far were adults and activists before the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, and there are more, who similarly chose varying political paths in the GDR. They include the entirely conformist political propagandist and lawyer, Friedrich Karl Kaul, who had become active in oppositional circles in 1933 and had been in exile in Colombia, Nicaragua and the USA. After his return he made it his life’s work to link Nazism and antisemitism to post-war western society and was a joint plaintiff in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–66.³⁶ Rudolf Hirsch joined the KPD in 1931 and left Germany in 1938 for Palestine via Sweden. In Palestine he collaborated with Arnold Zweig. After his return to Germany in 1949 he became a court reporter. In the 1980s he published a novel about the Zionist bombing of a refugee ship, the Patria, which cost 250 Jewish refugees their lives in Haifa in 1940.³⁷ Together with his wife, Rosemarie Schuder, he also published an extensive study of antisemitism, for which they were awarded Nationalpreis der DDR in 1988.³⁸ Politically, he was not active.

Alfred Kantorowicz was born into an irreligious Jewish family and won the Iron Cross in World War I while still a teenager. The thesis for his law doctorate was on international law aspects of Zionism. In 1931 he joined the KPD and was in exile from 1933–46, first in France and, from 1941, Mexico. After returning to Germany he joined the SED in 1947. Appointed Professor of Modern German Literature in Berlin, he struggled with the increasing requirement for conformity and, suspecting he might imminently be arrested, fled the GDR in August 1957. Stephan Hermlin spent the years 1936–45 in Palestine, France and Switzerland. After his return he became an original if politically largely conformist writer who highlighted some Jewish resistance activity in two early collections and also wrote on Heine and other Jewish themes. He only publicly confronted problematic GDR attitudes to Jews, albeit indirectly, late in his career in the semi-autobiographical text, Abendlicht.³⁹ Any challenges he made to the GDR authorities’ attitudes were, according to Wolffsohn, conveyed in private.⁴⁰

Stefan Heym fled Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1933 and arrived in the USA in 1935, where he edited a communist newspaper in New York and served in the US Army in World War II. Sent back to the US from Germany because of pro-communist sympathies in 1945, Heym arrived in the GDR in 1953, via Czechoslovakia, and essentially made himself a nuisance to the GDR authorities with his critical writings: the first of his novels to be banned in the GDR, Fünf Tage im Juni, was a critical look at the June 1953 uprising, rather than on any Jewish theme.⁴¹ Not so, however, his novels Lassalle and Ahasver, which also could only appear in the GDR after some delay.⁴² Lassalle, in particular, imputes anti-Semitic sentiments to Karl Marx, which, I suggest elsewhere, may have been too much for the GDR censor.⁴³ Heym was something of a troublemaker in the GDR, but it was not in respect of Jewish matters. He remained in the GDR and became a PDS member of the Bundestag in 1994.

Hans Mayer (1907–2001), by contrast, left the GDR in 1963, fifteen years after he had gone there with his friend Hermlin. A founding member of the SAPD in 1931, and later a member of the KPD-O, a KPD splinter group, Mayer had spent the Nazi period in France and Switzerland. In 1949 he was offered a professorship in Leipzig and for several years was able to move freely between East and West. From the mid-1950s he was subjected to increasing challenges in the GDR. He lost faith in what it had become, but that appears to have had little to do with his Jewishness. He had lost faith in the possibility of genuine discourse in the GDR, because dialectics, he felt, had become impossible in the post-Stalinist era. He found that with his opinions he was offering ‘eine Lehrmeinung zuviel’.⁴⁴ Mayer’s colleague in Leipzig, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) had reached a similar conclusion by the mid-1950s. Having spent the Nazi period in Swiss, Czechoslovak and American exile, Bloch had also gone to Leipzig, in 1948, to take up a professorship. His break with the leadership followed in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising, and he was compulsorily retired. In 1961, after the building of the Berlin Wall, he did not return from a trip to West Germany.

What of those who were children when they were exiled, or who were the children of exiles? Peter Fischer, born in May 1944 in London, had been born when hope for the future returned in the later stages of World War 2 following Nazi defeats: ‘eine ganze Reihe Emigranten hatten nach der Stalingrader Niederlage der deutschen Wehrmacht ihre Hoffnungen in Form von Kindern dokumentiert’, he stated in interview in the early 1990s.⁴⁵ In that interview Fischer documents his experience as a reservist in the army of the GDR (NVA), in which his ‘comrades’ at one point sang the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and other Nazi songs, and he lodged a formal complaint, which led to a lecture on Auschwitz being delivered to the soldiers but also fears that the West German press might be informed of the episode.⁴⁶ Despite such experiences, and fully conscious of the GDR’s negativity towards Israel, Fischer nevertheless states: ‘für mich war die DDR immerhin ein Hoffnungsstaat, der noch die Chance in sich barg, den Menschen ein sozial gerechtes, ein gutes gesellschaftliches Milieu zu bieten’.⁴⁷ Fischer didn’t leave the GDR. Rather, it left him in 1990. His identity, he said, was regional, and he felt a close affinity to Berlin, and a greater one to Israel than to, say Bavaria.

Christoph Trilse (1932–2017) was born in Breslau and spent his childhood from 1933–1946 an exile in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Trieste, Shanghai and Slovenia. In 1946 the family returned to his mother’s native Vienna. She went to the GDR in 1952 and was victimised in 1953 as a ‘Titoist’ and ‘Zionist’, and was later rehabilitated.⁴⁸ Trilse joined her in 1957 to study under Mayer and Bloch in Leipzig, and he became a literary and theatre critic, editor and essayist. It was in the GDR that a serious engagement with his Jewish background began, following an attack on his mother’s home in Berlin-Lichtenberg on the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, an attack that deeply affected his mother.⁴⁹ In response, she took back her maiden name, Finkelstein, and Trilse appended that surname to his own. Both of them became more involved in Jewish cultural circles, though neither became particularly religious. Yet he continued to publish throughout the 1980s in the GDR as ‘Christoph Trilse’, changing to the new form only after the fall of the Wall.⁵⁰

For Barbara Honigmann (b.1949), born to Jewish parents who returned from British exile in 1947, it was the birth of her child in 1976 that led to a deep engagement with her Jewish origins. Her father, Georg Honigmann (1903–84), had been a committed communist. In her youth Honigmann had ‘in ethnischer und kultureller Hinsicht eine bestimmte jüdische Identität. Sie war jedoch keineswegs spirituell’.⁵¹ In 1981 she emigrated with her husband and has been active in Jewish life in Strasbourg since then. In her first collection, Roman von einem Kinde, she reflected on three key aspects to her migration: from East to West, from Germany to France, and from assimilation to Orthodox Judaism.⁵² Irene Runge (b.1942) is a child of Jewish communist parents — her father was Alexander Kupfermann (1901–94) — who became involved in the Jewish community in Berlin and published on Kristallnacht in GDR times and on Russian Jewish immigrants to Germany in the 1990s.⁵³ Sonja Beckmann (b.1952) is the Berlin-born child of a Bohemian German communist father and a Czech Jewish mother who spent the Nazi period in Britain. Beckmann joined the SED when she was 18, having been brought up a committed communist with an unspoken awareness of her Jewish background.⁵⁴ Real identification with her Jewishness only came after 1990, she says.⁵⁵

Kathrin Singer (b.1956) was born in Halle to Jewish parents who had survived the War in Switzerland. Her father, Rudolf Singer (1915–80), was an active journalist and member of the KPD, who had served time in Nazi prisons before emigrating in 1938.⁵⁶ Returning in 1945 to work in Bavaria, he moved to the GDR in 1951, was caught up in the paranoia of the early 1950s and banished to the provinces. He later rose through the ranks to become Editor-in-Chief of Neues Deutschland (1966–71), in succession to Hermann Axen, another Jewish communist.⁵⁷ Indeed, it is a curiosity that for all but three of the first 22 years of the GDR’s existence the editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland was Jewish, the exception being, unsurprisingly, the years 1953–56.⁵⁸ Kathrin Singer reports that she was only confronted with her Jewishness when she went to study in Moscow in 1977, where, echoing Kuczynski’s comment about Soviet antisemitism, she says that Jews were excluded from certain courses, including foreign policy. Jewishness had been no topic of conversation at all in her home in the GDR, though both parents were Jewish.⁵⁹

Maya Stillmann (b.1958), by contrast, grew up the daughter of a Jewish communist who had married a Palestinian Jew in exile in Palestine. Her father’s reaction to being victimised in the early 1950s for referencing the Slanský Trial at work was: ‘Das, was mir passiert ist, berührt nicht die marxistische Lehre und nicht die Partei’.⁶⁰ Her mother always considered herself an Israeli. Her grandparents moved to the GDR in 1962–63, as a result of which she grew up absolutely conscious of her Jewish origins: ‘Ich habe die jüdischen Feiertage als Kind erlebt’.⁶¹ Stillmann’s Jewish communist household had little to do with religion and everything to do with tradition as an expression of Jewish identity.

In an essay on the 2007 Berlin exhibition ‘“Das hat’s bei uns nicht gegeben” — Antisemitismus in der DDR’, Anetta Kahane (b.1954) references the ways in which the Jewish experience of the Holocaust was quietly subsumed into the dominant antifascist narrative that was the foundational myth of the GDR.⁶² Though the broad thrust of her article is accurate, she is given to making sweeping judgements, such as this: ‘Doch während die alte Bundesrepublik sich mit dem Nationalsozialismus und manchmal sogar mit dem Antisemitismus auseinandergesetzt hat, stand am Anfang der DDR der Schlußstrich unter diesem entscheidenden Punkt’.⁶³ It is as if the West German concept of ‘Stunde Null’ had never existed. Another sweeping statement is this claim about the GDR: ‘Darüber hinaus war jedes religiöse Bekenntnis — auch für Juden — politisch explizit unerwünscht und damit auch gefährlich’.⁶⁴ Considering that organised religion continued to attract followers throughout the forty-one years of the GDR’s existence, and that the state engaged on an official level with Christian churches and Jewish congregations alike, the word ‘gefährlich’ seems exaggerated, even as we recognise that discrimination certainly followed for many as a result of religious activity. Kahane’s discussion of the Six-Day War declaration by Jewish citizens of the GDR (see above) contains none of the nuance that ordinary GDR citizens could see, courtesy of the absence of some leading names. This is all the more surprising given that Kahane herself was born in and grew up in the GDR, her parents having returned from exile in Spain and France in 1945.⁶⁵ Kahane’s parents were thoroughly loyal to the GDR, their Jewishness a matter of heritage and little more. Kahane herself applied to leave the GDR in ‘1986 oder 87’.⁶⁶ Serious engagement with her Jewish origins came afterwards.

Peter Monteath has rightly argued that ‘As a satellite state of the USSR, the GDR could hardly remain untouched by the wave of anti-Semitism stemming from and directed by its patron state’ in the early 1950s.⁶⁷ Moreover, as the only ‘half-nation’ in the Soviet Bloc, the East German leadership had every reason to be less secure and thus more controlling on questions of identity. The GDR defined itself as THE antifascist state in Germany, and there can be little doubt that the political convictions held by the communist founders were genuine. Many of those founders were Jewish. As Frank Stern has written:

German antifascism was not only an ideology that soon became instrumentalized for the purposes of creating a society that should be molded according to the Soviet model. Antifascism was also the basic context of the lives, aspirations and activities of those who had decided to contribute to the development of a just and democratic society in the East. The disillusions and sometimes bitter personal consequences on a personal level for the German-Jewish intellectuals followed later.⁶⁸

Those discussed here, or their parents, made a conscious decision to go to the Soviet Zone/GDR after 1945. Most stayed, even though the state was anti-Zionist and there were sporadic antisemitic attacks, episodes which can only be seen as crass and unforgivable in the context of Germany’s history. Both official and unofficial antisemitism were present in the GDR. But the fact remains that there was a diversity in Jewish life in the GDR, though there were proportionately fewer young Jews than in the population as a whole. These were people who had been exiled once and come ‘home’, some to face temporary persecution, many to enjoy careers and high office, some to start families. Some had the stomach for a second exile, some left again out of fear, but for various reasons many chose to make the GDR their home despite the disadvantages and periodic threats that arose because of their Jewishness. Their stories, as discussed here, are far more nuanced and differentiated than much of the simplistic writing on East German Jews and antisemitism would suggest. These Jews and their children made for a significant degree of Jewish diversity in the GDR, even as their numbers were relatively small, and their lives, taken as a whole, should be celebrated for that diversity. To do otherwise, to dismiss these Jews as mere pawns in the service of GDR propaganda, willingly or inadvertently, is to deny them agency in the decisions they made about their own lives and their own identities.

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Notes on contributors

Pól Ó Dochartaigh

Pól Ó Dochartaigh has been Deputy President and Registrar at the University of Galway, Ireland, since 2014. He holds BAs in German from Cardiff University and in Irish Language and Literature from the University of Ulster, as well as a PhD and a DLitt in German/History from the University of Nottingham. He was formerly Professor of German and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster. Elected to membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010, he also served as President of the Association for German Studies in GB & IRL (2011–14). His monographs include The Portrayal of Jews in GDR Prose Fiction (1997), Germany since 1945 (2003), Julius Pokorny, 1887–1970: Germans, Celts and Nationalism (2003), and Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (2015). He will shortly resume work on a history of Irish attitudes to Jews in the twentieth century.

Notes

1 Helmut Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen. Erinnerungen eines Dresdner Juden (Berlin: Links, 1991), pp. 12–26.

2 Ibid., pp. 41–47.

3 ‘Eschwege, Helmut’, at: https://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/de/recherche/kataloge-datenbanken/biographische-datenbanken/helmut-eschwege (accessed 22 April 2023).

4 I. Rennap was a pen-name of Israel Panner (1909–73), an Austrian/British writer and communist.

5 Eschwege, Fremd unter meinesgleichen, pp. 65–67.

6 See, for example, Lothar Mertens, ‘Staatlich propagierter Antizionismus: Das Israelbild der DDR’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, 2 (1993), 139–53. Also Angelika Timm, ‘Israel in den Medien der DDR’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, 2 (1993), 154–73.

7 Michael Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte. Juden in Deutschland in Ost und West. Tatsachen und Legenden (Munich: Ferenczy bei Bruckmann, 1995).

8 ‘Zu den Akteuren dieses Buches zählen Täter und Opfer, Schurken und nützliche Idioten, Mitläufer und Mitmacher, … ’. Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte, p. 13.

9 Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last, Deutscher zu sein (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1990), pp. 215–28.

10 See, for example, Paul O’Doherty, ‘The GDR in the Context of Stalinist Show Trials and Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe 1948–54’, German History, 10 (1992), 302–17. See also Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

11 Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte, p. 13.

12 ‘Kahn, Siegbert (Sieke)’, at: https://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/de/recherche/kataloge-datenbanken/biographische-datenbanken/siegbert-sieke-kahn (accessed 6 May 2023).

13 Siegbert Kahn, Antisemitismus und Rassenhetze. Eine Übersicht über ihre Entwicklung in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1948).

14 Kahn, Antisemitismus, pp. 86–87. See also I. Rennap, Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1942).

15 Kahn, Antisemitismus, p. 88.

16 Pól Ó Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 57–58.

17 Bernd-Rainer Barth, Christoph Links, Helmut Müller-Enbergs und Jan Wielgohs (eds), Wer war Wer in der DDR. Ein biographisches Handbuch (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996, 3., aktualisierte Ausgabe), pp. 421–22.

18 Jürgen Kuczynski, ‘Ein linientreuer Dissident’. Memoiren 1945–1989 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994).

19 Jürgen Kuczynski, Dialog mit meinem Urenkel. Neunzehn Briefe und ein Tagebuch (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989). First published 1983.

20 Kuczynski, Dialog, pp. 52–53.

21 See Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in Ostdeutschland (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000).

22 Barth et al., Wer war Wer, p. 346.

23 Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte, pp. 153–55.

24 Barth et al, Wer war Wer, pp. 828–29.

25 See Philipp Graf, ‘Twice Exiled: Leo Zuckermann (1908–85) and the Limits of the Communist Promise’, Journal of Contemporary History, 56.3 (2021), 766–88 (here p. 786).

26 Anna Seghers, Die Toten bleiben jung (Berlin: Aufbau, 1949).

27 Anna Seghers, ‘Post ins Gelobte Land’, in Seghers, Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1947).

28 See Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Deutsche Literatur in West und Ost (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1983), p. 321.

29 See Anna Seghers, ‘Post ins Gelobte Land’, in Anna Seghers, Erzählungen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1974, 2nd edition), pp. 203–35.

30 Netty Reiling (Anna Seghers), Jude und Judentum im Werk Rembrandts (Leipzig: Reclam, 1981).

31 Walter Janka, Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit (Berlin: Aufbau, 1990), p. 14.

32 See, for example, Arnold Zweig und Hermann Struck, Das ostjüdische Antlitz (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920). Arnold Zweig, Caliban oder Politik und Leidenschaft (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1927). Arnold Zweig, De Vriendt kehrt heim (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932).

33 Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte, pp. 141–45.

34 Arnold Zweig, Traum ist teuer (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962). See also, Paul O’Doherty, ‘Zionism bad, Zionists … good? Two GDR historical novels as journalism: Arnold Zweig’s Traum ist teuer and Rudolf Hirsch’s Patria Israel’, in Osman Durrani and Julian Preece (eds), The German Historical Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 157–67.

35 Among the others who refused to sign were Lin Jaldati, a Dutch-born communist and performer of Yiddish songs, the artist and writer Peter Edel and the otherwise entirely conformist Zweig specialist and academic, Heinz Kamnitzer.

36 See F. K. Kaul, Der Fall Eichmann (Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1963).

37 Rudolf Hirsch, Patria Israel (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1983).

38 Rosemarie Schuder, Rudolf Hirsch, Der gelbe Fleck. Wurzeln und Wirkungen des Judenhasses in der deutschen Geschichte (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1987).

39 Stephan Hermlin, Die Zeit der Gemeinsamkeit (Berlin: Aufbau, 1950). Stephan Hermlin, Die erste Reihe (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1951). Stephan Hermlin, Abendlicht (Leipzig: Reclam, 1979).

40 Wolffsohn, Die Deutschland Akte, pp. 155–59.

41 Stefan Heym, 5 Tage im Juni (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974).

42 Stefan Heym, Lassalle (Munich: Bechtle, 1969; GDR edition: Berlin: Neues Leben, 1974). Stefan Heym, Ahasver (Bertelsmann: Munich, 1981; GDR edition: Berlin, Der Morgen, 1988).

43 See Paul O’Doherty, The Portrayal of Jews in GDR Prose Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 170–78.

44 Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf. Erinnerungen Band 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 240–60 (p. 258).

45 Peter Fischer, ‘Ich wollte ja nie Funktionär werden’, in Vincent von Wroblewsky (Hg.), Zwischen Thora und Trabant. Juden in der DDR (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), pp. 63–81 (here p. 67). When I referenced this at the New College, Oxford conference in September 2022 held in memory of Ian Wallace, the esteemed historian Anthony Grenville spoke to me privately to say that he owed his own origins to exactly that sentiment, albeit that El Alamein as much as Stalingrad had been the inciting moment. He later wrote: ‘I was born in August 1944. My mother had to have a small surgical intervention before conceiving. But my parents wouldn't have considered having a child as long as there was a significant chance of Hitler winning the war. They were probably as much influenced in their decision by the Battle of El Alamein as by Stalingrad — they gave me the middle name Brian in memory of a British officer killed in North Africa. Whereas the British baby boom started when the demobilised men came home and the women returned to their usual way of life in 1945, the refugee baby boom started around summer 1943. A whole swathe of my parents' refugee friends had children between that time and the end of the war, at least as many as during the post-1945 baby boom.’ Email Anthony Grenville to Pól Ó Dochartaigh, 25 April 2023. 

46 Fischer, ‘Ich wollte ja nie Funktionär werden’, pp. 75–77.

47 Fischer, ‘Ich wollte ja nie Funktionär werden’, p. 73.

48 Jochanaan Christoph Trilse-Finkelstein, ‘Man kann nicht aus dem Judentum austreten’, in Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant, pp. 40–62 (here pp. 47–49). The spelling ‘Jochanaan’ is used here. Elsewhere it is ‘Jochanan’.

49 Trilse-Finkelstein, ‘Man kann nicht aus dem Judentum austreten’, pp. 40–41. Trilse-Finkelstein reports that there were some 40 attacks that night in Lichtenberg, of which only two or three were directed at Jews.

50 See, for example, Christoph Trilse, Das Werk des Peter Hacks (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1980). Christoph Trilse, Heinrich Heine (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1984). Jochanan Trilse-Finkelstein, Heinrich Heine, Gelebter Widerspruch: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2001).

51 Olivier Guez, Heimkehr der Unerwünschten. Eine Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland nach 1945 (Munich: Piper, 2011), p. 291.

52 Barbara Honigmann, Roman von einem Kinde (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986).

53 Kurt Pätzold and Irene Runge, Pogromnacht 1938 (Berlin: Dietz, 1988). Irene Runge, ‘Ich bin kein Russe’, Jüdische Zuwanderung zwischen 1989 und 1994 (Berlin: Dietz, 1995).

54 Sonja Beckmann, ‘You are important, es ist dein Leben’, in Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant, pp. 100–23 (here p. 102).

55 Beckmann, ‘You are important, es ist dein Leben’, pp. 118–19.

56 Kathrin Singer, ‘Das war bei uns kein Thema’, in Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant, pp. 146–67.

57 Barth et al, Wer war Wer, p. 694.

58 They were, in addition to Singer, Rudolf Herrnstadt 1949–53 and Hermann Axen 1956–66.

59 Singer, ‘Das war bei uns kein Thema’, pp. 150–51. See Kuczynski, Dialog, pp. 52–53.

60 Maya Stillmann, ‘Ich war ein Teil der DDR’, in Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant, pp. 168–97 (here p. 175).

61 Stillmann, ‘Ich war ein Teil der DDR’, pp. 179–80.

62 Anetta Kahane, ‘Am Anfang war der Schlußstrich. Erfahrungen mit einer Ausstellung zum Antisemitismus in der DDR’, in Wilhelm Heitmeyer (ed.), Deutsche Zustände. Folge 7 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp. 219–31.

63 Kahane, ‘Am Anfang war der Schlußstrich’, p. 220.

64 Kahane, ‘Am Anfang war der Schlußstrich’, p. 225.

65 Anetta Kahane, ‘Ich durfte, die anderen mußten’, in Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant, pp. 124–45 (here p. 131).

66 Kahane, ‘Ich durfte, die anderen mußten’, p. 139.

67 Peter Monteath, ‘The German Democratic Republic and the Jews’, German History, 22.3 (2004), 448–68 (here p. 454).

68 Frank Stern, ‘The Return to the Disowned Home — German Jews and the Other Germany’, New German Critique, 67 (Winter 1996), 57–72 (here p. 64).