Memory Failure
Pankaj Mishra: Germany’s Commitment to Israel, 4 January 2024
Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany
by Esra Özyürek.
Stanford, 264 pp., £25.99, March,978 1 5036 3556 2 Show More
by Esra Özyürek.
Stanford, 264 pp., £25.99, March,
Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust
by Andrew Port.
Harvard, 352 pp., £30.95, May,978 0 674 27522 5 Show More
by Andrew Port.
Harvard, 352 pp., £30.95, May,
“... In March 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone ... ”