cover image Eternal Guilt?: Forty Years of German-Jewish Relations

Eternal Guilt?: Forty Years of German-Jewish Relations

Michael Wolffsohn. Columbia University Press, $90 (225pp) ISBN 978-0-231-08274-7

This sure-to-be-controversial polemic, which has had four printings in Germany where it was first published in 1988, argues that the Holocaust and anti-Germanism remain ``key Jewish fixations'' even though the vast majority of Germans are tolerant, liberal and by no means anti-Semitic. Wolffsohn, a Jew who was raised in Israel, is a German citizen and a professor of government at a military university in Munich. He maintains that the Jewish- Israeli ``fixation'' on the Holocaust, fostered by the false notion that German Christians born since 1945 share collective national guilt for the genocide, threatens to open an unnecessary rift between descendants of the Holocaust's perpetrators and descendants of the survivors. Less controversial than his central thesis is Wolffsohn's intensive analysis of German-Israeli and German-Jewish relations extending from the debate over German restitution payments to Israel in 1952, through the Persian Gulf War--in which the danger loomed that Iraq might attack Israel using chemical weapons developed in Germany. (Nov.)