Jewish Diplomacy and the German Democratic Republic

Bookhouse: American Sephardi Federation, Centro Primo Levi, Dan Wyman Books, a cooperative initiative.

Jonathan Kaplan (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow, Center For European Studies, University of Verona) presents his research in progress.

The concept of “coming to terms with the past” has increasingly emerged as a central component in European postwar historiography. Moreover, starting in the early 1990s, the debates on memory and the historical past, totalitarianism, anti-Fascism, and the persecution of the Jews became key elements in the definition of a shared historical landscape.

As the European Union expanded East and South, including countries that did not consider themselves direct successors of Nazi Fascism, the consensus over the definitions of totalitarianism, dissent, resistance, and the Holocaust came into question, and new controversies were brought to the fore. Debates from former Eastern bloc countries have echoed in academia and public discourse. The case of the Democratic Republic of Germany can help rethink the different courses of denazification and memorialization, as well as diverging interpretations of statehood and democracy.

Jonathan Kaplan’s research examines the GDR governments’ multifaceted attitudes towards the memory of the persecution of the Jews, the State of Israel, and Jewish organizations from various countries of Eastern and Western Europe.

Kaplan notes that the GDR adopted a contradictory strategy that pursued seemingly incompatible goals: self-fashioning as an anti-fascist state and expressing sympathy to Jewish victims of the Nazis while criticizing Israeli policies in the Middle East and maintaining loyalty to the Soviet anti-Israeli foreign politics. If, on the one hand, the GDR political leadership perceived Israel as a Western capitalist and colonial stronghold in the Middle East, on the other, the government fostered intensive work among Jewish organizations and individuals, inventing its own version of “coming to terms with the past.”

Posters of Nikita Khrushchev, Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck and the East German Premier Otto Grotewohl on an East Berlin Wall. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images). Hulton Archive, 28th August 1961.