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Dan Diner (Hrsg.): Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur. Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Band 1–3, A – Lu. Verlag J. B. Metzler Stuttgart 2011-2012. Pro Band zwischen 500 und 600 Seiten, Leinen € 229,95. (Das auf sieben Bände konzipierte Werk kann nur komplett bezogen werden). ISBN 978-3-476-02500-5

The Holocaust has increasingly become a universal moral icon in the realm of political and historical discourse. The impact of the catastrophe can especially be felt in the various European cultures, with their disparate legacies in regard to the divers domains of tradition, experience and memory. Its highly complex imprint, as enigmatic as it is ambiguous, can be detected even within the realm of collective and individual identities. No wonder that in Germany and widiin the framework of its political culture the traces of the Nazi past and the Holocaust as its main core can be discerned at almost all layers of feeling and expression in both the private as well as the public spheres. Indeed, the history of the Federal Republic seems to be accompanied by cyclically recurring debates and periodic outbursts in regard to the Nazi past, which are often prompted by questions concerning the interpretation and representation of the Holocaust. Such a discourse appears basic to Germany's moral and historical self-awareness. Its fluctuations allow the beholder to gauge prevailing circumstances in the public realm and beyond. This discourse contributes to the formation of a specific collective consciousness, indebted to an incriminated past. By all appearances, the Holocaust might well be defined as an identity-forming foundational event.

Le texte tente de présenter un tableau de l’Europe actuelle dans la perspective d’une mémoire juive. Bien que les Juifs aient peu de choses à regretter des régimes communistes d’Europe orientale qui les rejetaient dans l’espace du passé et de la tradition, les changements qui s’annoncent en Europe centrale représentent une sorte de menace. La revalorisation de la culture allemande en Europe de l’Est renvoie les Juifs à la période prénazie, tandis qu’Auschwitz les éloigne d’une Europe centrale où renaissent les nationalismes. L’Allemagne qui en tant que république fédérale était liée — tout comme l’État d’Israël — à l’événement fondateur de l’écrasement du national-socialisme s’oriente désormais vers des références plus anciennes dans son histoire. Der Text versucht aus der Perspektive jüdischer Erinnerung ein heutiges Europabild zu entwerfen. Obwohl es für Juden nur wenig gibt, was sie den kommunistischen Regierungen Osteuropas, die die Juden in den Raum der Vergangenheit und Traditionen verbannten, nachtrauern könnten, stellen die sich anbahnenden Veränderungen in Mitteleuropa eine Art Bedrohung dar. Durch die Aufwertung der deutschen Kultur in Osteuropa werden die Juden auf die Zeit vor der Machtergreifung zurückverwiesen, indessen Auschwitz sie von einem Mitteleuropa, das erneut von nationalen Bestrebungen durchtrieben ist, weiter fern hält. Deutschland als Bundesrepublik war — wie auch der Staate Israel — an seine Entstehung aus dem Niedergang des Nationalsozialismus stark gebunden und wendet sich nun älteren historischen Geschehnissen zu. The text presents an outline of present-day Europe from the perspective of a Jewish memory. Although the Jews had little to regret from the Communist regimes of eastern Europe which put them back into the realm of the past and the tradition, the changes which now appear in central Europe represent a type of threat. The revalorisation of German culture in eastern Europe puts the Jews back to the pre-Nazi period whereas Auschwitz distances them from a central Europe where nationalism is reviving. Germany, from now on, is turning towards older reference points in its history — which as a federal republic has been linked, just as the state of Israel, to the founding event of the destruction of National Socialism.

Let me begin on an apodictic note with the following thesis: Europe, on the fast track to integration, seems more and more to be finding a common unifying memory in the events of World War II, and what is increasingly emerging a posteriori as its core event the Holocaust. Such a commonly shared European memory is not only assuming the salience of an arsenal of remembrance. No, it is also being transformed into a veritable foundational, a seminal event quite comparable to a certain extend to the Reformation or the French Revolution, an event, to which historical memory, as it thickens into a catalog of narrations and values, seems to lead back. The thesis of World War II as an act of political foundation for a future and united Europe may not be so new after all. Quite immediately after 1945, elderly statesmen such as the French Robert Schuman, the German Konrad Adenauer and the Italian Alicide de Gasperi, whose generational memories reached back far before World War I, propagated in due time the idea of Europe as a project for "neutralizing" so to say the particularistic historical nationalisms on the Continent. Besides the fact, that those three personalities were more or less and because of their age biographically deeply rooted in the 19th century as well in the proper peripheries of their respective nation-states (Schuman was born in Luxembourg and was educated in the 1871 German annexed Alsass; the former mayor of Cologne, Adenauer, made always his distance to the Protestant and Prussian German nation-state felt, and was after 1919 even blamed as a pro-French Rhenish separatist; de Gasperi originated

Few works on the destruction of European Jewry have elicited as much controversial discussion and few have attracted as much attention as Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Discussion of Hannah Arendt's trial report on the "banality of evil" was so intense that it became a kind of icon in the discourse surrounding Auschwitz and related crimes. In short, the concept of the banality of evil now constitutes a career in itself, both in the realm of public debate and in the confines of academic disciplines. It has become a cipher for the historical and moral evaluation of National Socialist crimes as well as for the

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) goes hand in hand with putting to rest its own ideological justification, namely antifascism. The GDR's demise ironically and belatedly confirms the GDR's materialist self-interpretation: the decline of the (self-declared) socialist state invalidates the theoretical foundation formerly affirmed as true. At the very least, the GDR's passing, its raison-d'etre an intended antifascism has therefore proved to be historically erroneous. In fact, this very radical proof the annihilation of a state which justified its existence philosophically was hardly needed to convict worn-out antifascism of being an ideological lie. From the very onset, it was as erroneous as it was desperately needed. A paradoxical reversal: the GDR's collective project claimed an identity that was opposed to the fascist experience of its German population (and that was therefore fictitious), and this identity functioned predominantly as a way of denying the actual national socialist past. Thus the core event of National Socialism the killing of millions in extermination camps was fundamentally skirted, or at least the extent to which it was considered was not nearly appropriate. In any case, the philosophical premise of this antifascist identity ricocheted off the extermination of millions, and the ideologically motivated interpretation of National Socialism remained, at best, highly insufficient. The obvious denial in the GDR's antifascist foundation is illumi

The events we are watching unfold in the heart of Europe over the last few months, weeks, and days a chain of events evolving within ever smaller spans of time invite the interested contemporary observer, fascinated and at the same time filled with a sense of apprehension, to conclude that he or she is witnessing a profound historical change. And there is no doubt that something has indeed come to an end though one might certainly debate just what that something is. Attempts to grasp this dynamic change are beset by an additional complication, namely that such a diagnostic enterprise tries to place events into a historical framework, to explore the locus of the present within one's readings of the past. The diagnosis of the current moment dons a historiographical costume, so to speak. It is thus no surprise when the outcroppings of such "views" include presumptuous claims that the "end of history" is upon us, accompanied by a triumphant gesture alleging the victory of one form of society and polity over another. Last summer, in a widely discussed article, the American Francis Fukujama proclaimed the final victory of western liberalism over its totalitarian alternatives in this century: fascism and communism. The open society, it seems, has finally defeated its enemies; history appears to be approaching its fulfillment. As true as this apodictic, utterly certain realization of the victory of western values over their totalitarian alternatives may appear, the associated and highly questionable formula about the supposed "end of history" should give us pause for thought. Paradoxically, that notion reminds us of previous totalitarian temptations in history, since the

The new peace movement in West Germany has been blamed for being nationalistic. At first, it appears paradoxical to link the intention of maintaining peace or securing it in a humane way with a term that commonly stands for war and expansion. The peace movement, as heterogeneous as it may be, is based on the explicit desire to ban war and the violent use of power. The ultimate aim of the peace movement is to change those political, military, and social conditions which make war and violence possible. On the other hand, nationalism is historically known as the ideology of mass mobilization directed against other nationally organized communities, and it takes the shape of legitimate power acting against outside forces, i.e., it takes the shlape of war. How is it possible then to accuse the West German peace movement of nationalism? Is such an accusation merely cheap polemics used by those people who close their ears to the arguments of the peace movement and who instead seek to bury it with reasons of internal security? Obviously such critics are dishonest who accuse the peace movement of nationalism, and who seek to act militantly against foreign powers at the same time. But, despite this contradictory criticism, which instrumentalizes nationalism and neutralism, there has indeed been a tendency within the peace movement to emphasize nationalist reasons for rejecting missiles and armnnament. This is not surprising given that the peace movement tends to place the dominant collective system of security into question. It tries to point out that there are particular interests of individual communities against supra-national blocs with their special systems and interests. For instance, the peace movement in the Federal Republic reacted out ofparticularist and geographic interests to the proclamation of martial law in Poland and the repression of Solidarnosc. On the other hand, French pro