Volume 39, Number 13 · July 16, 1992
The Ways of Survival
By Ian Buruma
Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch
by Wolfgang Koeppen
Jüdischer Verlag, 150 pp., 28.00 DM
A Feast in the Garden
by George Konrád, translated by Imre Goldstein
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 394 pp., $23.95
Television images of orthodox Jews being pushed into German police vans are hard to watch without cringing. No doubt the Jews, who had come this spring from all over the world to protest in Hamburg against the plan to build a department store on the site of a former Jewish cemetery, were well aware of this. It was part of the show, so to speak. But with the instinctive cringe comes a sense of déjà vu. I am not talking so much about what plenty of people saw in Germany fifty years ago as about the tired symbolism of the occasion: West German consumerism dancing on the skeletons of the past; the good life as the quickest route to collective amnesia—the great cliché of the West German Wirtschaftswunder.
Review, 2989 words
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