Postwar lives & memory · Germany · After 1945
After 1945, rebuilding and a reckoning with inherited ideas became part of the struggle against continuing antisemitism.
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After 1945
Postwar lives & memory · Memory is a beginning
After 1945, rebuilding and a reckoning with inherited ideas became part of the struggle against continuing antisemitism.
A community rebuilds after genocide
The Holocaust left German Jewish life shattered. Survivors and later arrivals rebuilt communities, while their relationships to Germany differed. A national culture of remembrance developed around the crimes. Living Jewish experience nevertheless includes religion, family and ordinary civic life as well as the memory of persecution.
The church confronts its inheritance
In 2015, Germany’s Protestant church confronted Luther’s anti-Jewish legacy. In 2016 it rejected a mission to convert Jews and affirmed a renewed relationship with Judaism. These decisions addressed teachings that had helped make hostility credible. Institutional reform is part of the history because inherited prejudice can be examined and repudiated.