Volume 17

Ausgeschlagenes Erbe

Until World War II, Halberstadt was home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in Central Germany. This was reflected in its population and also in the fact that the small town situated in the Vorharz region was one of the centers of neo-Orthodoxy in Germany. In 1942, the last remaining Jews were deported and Halberstadt was heavily destroyed by Allied bombings in 1945. The town’s Jewish history then fell into oblivion until church circles revived the memory at the end of the 1970s. In his essay, Philipp Graf looks at how the state, the city and civil society approached the Jewish past in four decades of the GDR. Against the backdrop of antisemitic reservations in the city that are still vital today, the author asks to what extent the »prescribed antifascism« and the political culture of the GDR are expressed in this and influence how Jews, Judaism, and Jewish life are spoken about in Halberstadt and in the new federal states as a whole.