Fascism 9 (2020) 221-243 Exile Dreams: Antifascist Jews, Antisemitism and the ‘Other Germany’ Anna Koch University of Leeds, York, UK
[email protected] Abstract This article examines the meanings antifascist German Jews invested in antifascism and highlights its role as an emotional place of belonging. The sense of belonging to a larger collective enabled antifascist Jews to hold onto their Germanness and believe in the possibility of an ‘other Germany’. While most German Jewish antifascists remained deeply invested in their home country in the 1930s, this idea of the ‘other Germany’ became increasingly difficult to uphold in the face of war and genocide. For some this belief received the final blow after the end of the Second World War when they returned and witnessed the construction of German states that fell short of the hopes they had nourished while in exile. Yet even though they became disillusioned with the ‘other Germany’, they remained attached to antifascism. Keywords Germany – antifascism – antisemitism – exile – Jews – communism In Spring 1933, a few weeks after escaping from his home country, the German- Jewish writer Arnold Zweig began working on a short book in which he ‘took stock’ of German Jews’ achievements as well as reflected on their current situation. In his French exile, he lamented German Jews’ shortsightedness who by and large had allied themselves with bourgeois and even nationalist parties, oblivious to the fact they were ‘proletarians, proletarians in a thick coat of bourgeois culture.’1 1 Arnold Zweig, Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit (Leipzig: Reclam, 1991), 10. Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own.