The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

This chapter begins by outlining the history and development of Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, and it discusses how Yiddish went from being a vibrant language spoken by millions to being an endangered minority language with only a fraction of its original speaker population – primarily as a result of the Holocaust. The chapter explains how Yiddish came to be spoken in Britain from the 1880s onwards, when large numbers of Ashkenazim fled there to escape poverty and pogroms, and it details the initial tensions and subsequent cooperation between different waves and generations of Yiddish-speaking newcomers (which entailed shifting attitudes towards the Yiddish language). The chapter then provides an overview of the past and current geographical distribution of Yiddish-speaking communities in Britain, with a focus on the main urban centres, and it explores especially London’s thriving Yiddish culture between the two World Wars. This is followed by a discussion of the linguistic consequences of contact between Yiddish and English speakers, and particularly borrowings from each language into the other. Throughout, differences are explained regarding the language use and intergenerational transmission patterns of Yiddish among Haredi as compared to secular communities.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

This chapter presents Jewish and Christian documents leading up to and including the destruction of European Jewry, which reflect on the Christian contribution as well as those who were proactive in opposing Nazism. This period also witnessed the establishment of Jewish–Christian dialogue organisations, as well as the emergence of a small number of scholars who re-evaluated Jewish–Christian relations and helped establish the foundations of modern dialogue.

The chapter analyses the significance of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in public awareness, and the stages of formalized Holocaust memory which have followed. These include the introduction of compulsory Holocaust education in schools in the 1990s and the institution of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001, followed more recently by the reopening of the Imperial War Museum Holocaust galleries and plans for a UK Holocaust Memorial. Memory of the catastrophic genocide has remained hard to reconcile with that of the emphasis on wartime triumph which characterizes national recall in Britain, and this incompatibility continues to influence public conceptions of the Holocaust. Yet popular works of fiction and film, such as the television drama The Windermere Children (2020) about the post-war rehabilitation of child camp survivors in the Lake District, can have the effect of turning self-congratulation into self-reflection by urging that past generosity be repeated in the present, despite Britain’s departure from the European Union. The emphasis on Holocaust literacy could offset the tendency to mythologize Britain’s role in winning the Second World War in winning the Second World War.

Primarily poets, writers Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik had in common being daughters of immigrants, and both committed suicide. Storni’s poetry during her lifetime was popular and accessible, with topics of women, love, and modernity. Poet, journalist, dramatist, and maestra (schoolteacher), she gained early fame but only partial critical success. She crafted a defiant public image and even staged her suicide after a long struggle with cancer. She protested the stigma of being an unwed mother and other injustices borne by women. In contrast, Pizarnik initially reached a smaller but influential reading public; many young readers identify with her elusive and fractured poetry-theater of interiority. Rebellious and bisexual, she was the daughter of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust but lost their world. Loss, mourning, and sometimes violence, abjection, and terror are recurring topics, as in The Bloody Countess. As with Storni, there is confessionalism, but Pizarnik’s “I” is not a stable subject but a wandering marker, emphasizing the body, sexual desire, and fragmentation. Pizarnik’s struggle with language becomes a battle against the breakdown of the world.

This chapter reveals how stories about the past came to cohere around struggles over identity in the final decades of the twentieth century in and around Birmingham. The Second World War was becoming increasingly important across the generations, although it was mainly the children of the inter-war period, now pensioners, who looked back fondly on any part of inter-war life. However, immigration brought in groups with divergent memories of the past, including people whose family experiences of the early twentieth century were of fascism in continental Europe and those who felt that Atlantic slavery, not the struggles of the white working class, was the historical injustice of fundamental importance.

Today’s reception of Wagner and assumptions about the composer’s complicity in inspiring the Holocaust are primarily influenced by events that transpired long after the composer’s death. This chapter analyses Wagner’s own shifting attitudes toward Jews in the context of his life and times and considers the twentieth-century events that have shaped the Wagner legacy: Adolf Hitler’s associations with the Wagner family and Bayreuth, the exploitation of works and musical excerpts for political purposes during the Third Reich, rumours about the use of Wagner’s music in concentration camps, repertoire and staging during the Hitler years, and the troubled and conflicted reception of Wagner’s works in Israel. It also considers how refugees from Nazi Germany initially raised suspicion about the anti-Semitic content of the music dramas and their characters, how post-war scholarship has concentrated on proving these allegations, and how the Wagner family still struggles to come to terms with the past.

This second historical chapter provides some important episodes in ICRC history between about 1910 (the death of both Dunant and Moynier) and the end of the Cold War (which is when the rest of the book takes off). Thus the chapter introduces the ICRC through a selected review of its history, emphasizing: the development of international humanitarian law and the global Red Cross network, helping to apply that law and Red Cross Fundamental Principles through assistance and protection in the field, and related activities such as protection of political prisoners. All of this sets the stage for a close analysis of the ICRC since the end of the Cold War and particularly since about 2012. If one wants to know if the ICRC is now in demise, one needs a picture of what it was and did in the past.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.