Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany

A child of Polish Holocaust survivors, Mounk writes of growing up as a Jew in Germany—a “strange and slightly mysterious outsider”— and about the situation generally of Germany’s postwar Jewish population. He notes that until the showing of the American TV series Holocaust in 1979, Jews there were distant from and largely unknown to the German Gentile population, and that the Jews lived with the “daily humiliation of living among people who had been so thoroughly complicit.” After 1979, an exaggerated philo-Semitism pervaded Jewish-German interactions, “erect[ing] an invisible wall between Jews and Gentiles.” More recently, some Germans want to draw a “final line” under the legacy of Nazism, allowing Germany to emerge as a fully normal nation. This striving for normalcy has instead allowed a new “anti-Semitism by insinuation” to emerge. Unfortunately, Mounk’s book peters out at the end, both because the author tackles such tangential issues as Angela Merkel and the Eurobond crisis, and because he confesses that, after settling in New York, he has largely dropped the “external imposition” of his Jewish identity. Before this, however, Mounk provides some fascinating personal anecdotes of being a young Jew in Germany and telling sketches of the German Jewish community and German attitudes toward Jews. (Jan.)