Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
A German Requiem
By Amos Elon
Two Millennia of German Jewish History
Jewish Museum, Berlin
a permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Berlin. The scholarly catalog is still in preparation.
What can bring them back, those days when Germany was Europe's (at times even the world's) leading center of innovation? In science, in the arts, in industry, theater, film, music, and even in aviation many of the leading lights were not only German but Jews who went on to win Nobel prizes at a rate greatly disproportionate to their numbers. There was rarely a confluence of cultures and ethnic traditions that proved so richly creative at its peak but so deadly at its end. The American writer Frederic Grunfeld, in Prophets Without Honor: Freud, Kafka, Einstein and their World, later claimed that had the end not been so awful we would today hail the Weimar period as a 'golden age second only to the Italian Renaissance.'
Review, 3677 words
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