Event

An event with Helmut Walser Smith, NEH Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History, 2023-4 and the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University

Text available here: Last Gathering in Haigerloch: Jewish Survivors Return to their Swabian Hometowns, 1945-1949

Our Truth: How Jews and Germans made the Memory Culture of the Federal Republic 

"Our Truth" is the story of a remarkable and overlooked cooperation between Jews and Germans in establishing, marking, and preserving historical truth in their hometown communities in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The project began with a set of questions about a well known event. On the night of November 9, 1938, and during the following days, the Nazis destroyed or desecrated more than 1300 synagogues, some seventy percent of which were in small towns or villages. When did these communities finally commemorate their local synagogues as sites of injustice? Who erected the first plaques or monuments? Why? And who resisted efforts at commemoration?

In asking these questions,  I had hoped to make a scholarly contribution towards a social history of post-Holocaust memory work in the more than 900 small towns in which Nazis desecrated or destroyed synagogues. Much of the extant research on how Germans dealt with their past focuses on national policy and public intellectuals. Some newer work also focuses on large cities, like Berlin or Munich, or even  smaller ones, like Nuremberg. Yet as late as 1970, nearly half of all Germans still resided in towns of under 20,000 inhabitants--communities the historian Mack Walker once called German hometowns. 

The focus on smalltown Germany allows us to see grass roots truth work with greater clarity. We come to appreciate the importance of often overlooked groups of people, such as local historians, archivists, schoolteachers, preservationists, retirees, and clergy, and of unheralded institutions like community colleges. The narrower focus also allows us to see that many towns had help. 

That help came from Holocaust survivors who decided to live in their former communities or nearby. It came from German-Jewish refugees who returned to pay homage to the graves of their forefathers. And it came from Jews who visited the town and asked about the synagogue. In small towns where once a Jewish community existed, both Jews and Germans put considerable effort into local memory work. In time, that memory work became a cooperative venture--a Jewish-German enterprise.    

 This joint memory work was anything but abstract. Instead, the written correspondences between local citizens and German-Jewish survivors and refugees abroad centered on tangible undertakings, including securing sources documenting Nazi persecution, the creation of monuments for those whom the Nazis victimized, the preservation and renovation of synagogues and other artifacts of erstwhile Jewish communities, and the upkeep and cataloguing of Jewish cemeteries. A virtually untapped source reservoir, these correspondences also tell of the attempts of ordinary Germans to atone for and salvage some part of what was lost in the Nazi era; and they evoke the ambivalent feelings of ordinary Jews towards the communities they once called home. 

How to bring this material to light? How to see “the nervature of past life,” as W.G. Sebald once put it, in Germany’s complex turn to its difficult history? 

Self-evidently, a single researcher cannot pursue the multiplicity of efforts at “working through the past” across hundreds of communities. The temporal and spatial mapping of these efforts, supported by considerable statistical work, nevertheless provides the frame for this inquiry, solving the basic problem of when and where this memory work took place.  For more finely contoured images, answering the more difficult questions of who, why, and against what resistance, this book features a series of interlocking micro-historical studies of small towns and villages in Württemberg and the adjacent Hohenzollern lands. 

These microhistorical studies constitute the core of a work of narrative history intended as an academic crossover book, which will be submitted as a manuscript in 2025/6. In this book, I want to bring to life post-Holocaust memory work as it slowly unfolded in small towns and villages. Almost every chapter is focused on a place, a person, or an event central to this story. The chapters are short and written as if they are meant to be read aloud. Together, these chapters tell this remarkable history as a novel story of Jewish and German work. In time, this work turned into an extraordinary cooperation. And this cooperation centered on the attempt of Jews and Germans to understand the truth of what happened in their hometowns during the Holocaust.  

Text available here: Last Gathering in Haigerloch: Jewish Survivors Return to their Swabian Hometowns, 1945-1949