IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN-LANGUAGE CULTURE, Jews appear with striking frequency in affective elaborations of persecution, flight, extermination, and recovery, against which German remorse in the present can be positively evaluated. In one version, this typically implies a return to a (mythical) German-Jewish symbiosis. Here, we might think of Martin Walser’s Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (In defense of childhood, 1991), in which the Jewish doctor Halbedel is abused by the Nazis but treated kindly by Alfred’s family. Within the narrative economy of the novel, Alfred and his parents are the “true” Germans, the Nazis an aberration. Walser’s model for Halbedel, moreover, was almost certainly Victor Klemperer, whose diaries were finally published in 1995; for Walser, who published a eulogy in 1996 for the German-Jewish scholar who endured worsening persecution from 1933 until the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 prevented his imminent deportation to a death camp, Klemperer was an exemplary German patriot. Indeed, by the end of 1996, Hans Reiss reports, Klemperer’s recollections of the Nazi period had sold more than 150,000 hardback copies. Subsequently, a selection of his diary entries were reproduced in a paperback for young people; an essay competition was instituted (the Victor Klemperer Youth Prize, to encourage young Germans to chew over worthy subjects); streets were named after him; and a TV serialization, Victor Klemperer — Ein Leben in Deutschland (Victor Klemperer — a life in Germany, 1999) firmly established in the popular imagination the notion that he, and assimilated Jews generally, had always embodied a more authentic patriotism than the Nazis’ vicious chauvinism. Much was made, then, of his almost comic internalization of the traditionally German valorization of Bildung (education), his passion for the “Greats” of German culture, and his insistence that he was German and the Nazis no more than barbaric interlopers.

The way Klemperer’s diaries resonated with the German public is particularly striking, of course, but a large number of other examples can be cited of a similar desire to reconnect with a German-Jewish past mythologized as harmonious and productive for both sides, certainly before 1933 but also, in many cases, even during Hitler’s reign.