After The Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945

After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish survivors working to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.

Eva Kolinsky studied German Literature, Political Science and Sociology at the Free University in Berlin before coming to Britain in 1967 as a Volkswagen Research Fellow in German Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Since 1999, she has been Emeritus Professor (Keele) and Professional Research Fellow in German History at the University of Wolverhampton. She is the author of six books and numerous essays on German culture and has been a Fellow of the RSA since 1990.