Atina Grossmann – författare

"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making ''race'' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history." ---Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego

What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.

Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany''s surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

After the Shoah, Jewish survivors actively took control of their destiny. Despite catastrophic and hostile circumstances, they built networks and communities, fought for justice, and documented Nazi crimes. The essays, illustrations, and portraits of people and places contained in this volume are informed by a pan-European perspective. The book accompanies the first special exhibition at the re-opened Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

Der Band präsentiert die Vielfalt der jüdischen Erfahrungen in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit erstmals aus einer gesamteuropäischen, transnationalen Perspektive. Die elf Essays und zahlreichen Abbildungen zeigen, dass jüdische Überlebende und Flüchtlinge keine apathische Gruppe von Opfern waren, sondern ihr Schicksal nach dem Zivilisationsbruch aktiv in die Hand nahmen: Sie suchten überlebende Verwandte, organisierten ihre Ausreise, versuchten trotz katastrophaler Zustände soziale Netzwerke und jüdische Gemeinden wiederaufzubauen und bemühten sich um Gerechtigkeit und Wiedergutmachung sowie um die Dokumentation der nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen. Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Flüchtlingskrise und dem Zunehmen nationalistischer Politik in Europa fokussiert der Band auf die unmittelbare Nachkriegszeit als Geburtsstunde der europäischen Idee und zeigt, wie sich eben diese Idee in den Biographien überlebender Jüdinnen und Juden abzeichnet. Ein Überblick mit historischen Essays, Städte- und Personenporträts sowie Nahaufnahmen zum geretteten materiellen Erbe.