Stranger in My Own Country

November 18, 2013
A child of Polish Holocaust survivors, Mounk writes of growing up as a Jew in Germany—a “strange and slightly mysterious outsider”— and about the situation generally of Germany’s postwar Jewish population. He notes that until the showing of the American TV series Holocaust in 1979, Jews there were distant from and largely unknown to the German Gentile population, and that the Jews lived with the “daily humiliation of living among people who had been so thoroughly complicit.” After 1979, an exaggerated philo-Semitism pervaded Jewish-German interactions, “erect an invisible wall between Jews and Gentiles.” More recently, some Germans want to draw a “final line” under the legacy of Nazism, allowing Germany to emerge as a fully normal nation. This striving for normalcy has instead allowed a new “anti-Semitism by insinuation” to emerge. Unfortunately, Mounk’s book peters out at the end, both because the author tackles such tangential issues as Angela Merkel and the Eurobond crisis, and because he confesses that, after settling in New York, he has largely dropped the “external imposition” of his Jewish identity. Before this, however, Mounk provides some fascinating personal anecdotes of being a young Jew in Germany and telling sketches of the German Jewish community and German attitudes toward Jews.

November 15, 2013
In this memoir/polemic, a young German-born, Cambridge- and Harvard-schooled journalist finds that being a Jew in Germany still encapsulates searing attitudes the Germans hold about "the outsider." The product of a family originally from Poland, decimated then scattered during and after World War II, The Utopian founding editor Mounk grew up fatherless and an only child to his mother, Ala, who had settled in Germany for music school and work and ultimately stayed. Until age 18, the author attended schools around Germany, and he gleaned clues from his mother and others that being Jewish was somehow irregular and indeed aroused reactions (such as in class or among friends) of disbelief, fawning insincerity or hostility. As he traces his own growing defiance, Mounk looks at the changing attitudes toward Jews of the Germans from the end of war onward. The early denazification campaign by the Allied occupiers and exposure of Nazi war crimes against the Jews at Nuremberg gave way to a "reverberating silence" during the Cold War as many former Nazis were allowed to slip back into power and influence. Then there was the 1960s activism, which drew out young people to question and accuse their parents about their actions during the war, engendering open discussion, a challenge to school curricula and the showing of the miniseries Holocaust on German TV in 1979, prompting "shock" by viewers who did not realize the extent of Nazi crimes. The ensuing philo-Semitism also had its counterreaction, as Mounk has discovered, in today's growing sense that the Germans have reached the "finish line" and are fed up with being cudgeled by guilt over the Holocaust. Moreover, Germany's tough stance against the "profligate" nations in the Euro zone underscores its troubling attitudes toward immigration and the treatment of "guest workers." A solid combination of moving personal saga and thought-provoking research.

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December 15, 2013
Mounk's family was devastated by the Holocaust; those who survived were scattered across Europe after WWII. Yet Mounk's immediate family carved out an existence in their native Poland, most as loyal Communists, until anti-Semitic party purges in the 1960s and '70s led them to settle in Germany, where Mounk was born, in 1982. As a young Jew growing up in postwar Germany, his revelation to friends and acquaintances of his Jewish identity elicited a variety of responses, some predictable and some surprising. Some people were openly hostile, spouting blatantly racist screeds. Others reacted with what is best termed sullen silence, while others felt compelled to overreact with a stance of exaggerated philo-Semitism. More recently, Mounk has detected a shift in attitudes of many Germans, which has broad implications beyond relations with Jews. He perceives a sense that Germans feel that their guilt has been expiated by the passage of time, which results in a rise of German nationalism within Europe, unapologetic hostility to immigrants, and even a reassertion of claims of German victimization. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)