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| Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy |
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by Belinda Cooper
Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997) Since World War II, Germany (until 1990, West Germany) is estimated to have paid over DM 100 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors and to the state of Israel.(1) This Wiedergutmachung has included, among other things, the return of property, pensions, and transfers of goods and funds to Israel. A great deal has been written about the negotiations between Israel, West Germany, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) that led to the Luxembourg Agreement on reparations in 1952 and about the German laws under which restitution has been paid to individual Jewish survivors.(2) The original impetus for reparations came from Jewish organizations; although some German politicians, most notably Konrad Adenauer, supported restitution on moral grounds, German agreement to reparations had much to do with West Germany's desire to be reaccepted into the international community. The fact of paying reparations did not in itself signify German society's acknowledgement of responsibility. Even today, some Germans fail to recognize the moral imperative behind reparations and, more concretely, the ,material benefits Germany gained at the expense of Jews.(3) Still, Germany's payment of reparations was an impressive achievement and a unique historical occurrence; never before had a country guilty of atrocities attempted to make material amends to victims, particularly on such a large scale. In recent years, countries moving out of dictatorship have begun to follow Germany's example on a smaller scale, and the burgeoning literature on transitional justice has taken reparations as one means of dealing with the damage done by wide-scale violations of human rights.(4) In the process, writers have discussed the purposes of reparations: material justice, acknowledgement of moral responsibility, support for victims, and recompense for their suffering. Angelika Timm's book Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy supplements the existing literature on reparations by focusing on the less well-known attempts by Jewish organizations--primarily the Claims Conference and the World Jewish Congress (WJC)--to negotiate a reparations agreement with East Germany during the years between the end of World War II and German unification. In the process of setting out the facts of this ultimately unsuccessful endeavor, the book illuminates the specific difficulties of the German-Jewish situation, while hinting at--though leaving unexplored--more general questions about the purpose of reparations for the perpetrators and the victims. While West German restitution policy emerged hand in hand with its integration into the west and receipt of Marshall Plan aid, East German policy developed entirely within the context of a view of the Holocaust, Jews, and Israel that was determined by "Marxism-Leninism and guided by Soviet policy during the Cold War." (64) In the early postwar period, limited restitution was provided in some eastern zones of Germany. Some Jewish and non-Jewish communists, particularly those returning from wartime exile, acknowledged the unique nature of Nazi policy toward Jews and advocated restitution to them. By the early 1950s, however, following the onset of the cold war, East Germany's position had hardened into a mold that would not change, in its essence, until the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the dominant ideology, Nazism was an outgrowth of capitalism and imperialism. Jewish capitalists were no different from other capitalists; thus restitution of the property of Jews was tantamount to aiding the imperialist west. Those who advocated restitution to Jews were accused, during political trials in the early 1950s, of supporting "`theft of German property by foreign powers with the help of Jewish and capitalist elements.'"(5) As far as Israel was concerned, Soviet, and thus East German, doctrine viewed it as a tool of American imperialism and condemned West German reparations to Israel under the Luxembourg Agreement. The East German regime acknowledged neither a connection between the Holocaust and Zionism nor any obligation toward Israel; it courted the Arab world, originally in part to break out of the enforced isolation of West Germany's Hallstein doctrine, supported the Arab side in its wars against Israel, and later worked closely with the Palestine Liberation Organization. East Germany paid large amounts of reparations to the Soviet Union. Otherwise, in the East German view, restitution meant eliminating the supposed causes of Nazism and antisemitism-imperialism, militarism, and capitalism--and creating the "better German state." (47) Timm argues that "it would be too simple to equate [East German] anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism," (61), although the line between the two is clearly a very fine one. Antisemitism was officially banned, but "there was no fundamental debate on the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany" and antisemitic stereotypes continued to be used for political purposes. (56f.). The country's small Jewish communities received some state support. Jewish survivors received pensions, albeit lower ones than communist "fighters against fascism," since they had been merely "passive victims."(6) (50) Timm points out that the Holocaust was not denied but marginalized; the primary victims of the Nazis, in the official story, had been German communists. Indeed, "national identity was rooted in the political memory of the Nazis as an occupying power," and "once this self*image was established, the GDR was only a small step from commemorating itself as a victim." (190f.) Of course, Jewish organizations and Israel rejected this distorted version of history and demanded reparations from East Germany from the start. At the negotiations leading up to the Luxembourg Agreement, Israel assigned one-third of its claims to East Germany, in accordance with its portion of the German territory and population. Nevertheless, negotiations only really became possible in the early 1970s, when the partition of Germany was accepted internationally and East Germany began to gain diplomatic recognition. As Timm's subtitle reflects, however, East Germany's reasons for engaging in talks about reparations were largely pragmatic, in contrast to the Jewish emphasis on moral obligations. Following establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in 1974, "the East German government was interested primarily in improving its trade relations with the United States." (106) In the late 1970s and early 1980s, East Germany attempted a foreign policy more independent of the Soviet Union, with American encouragement. Jewish representatives hoped to use this opportunity to press their compensation claims. The United States assisted in this by applying some pressure, motivating East Germany at least to engage in discussions of reparations, and Timm catalogues a variety of official and unofficial meetings between Jewish representatives, East German leaders, and US officials. But East Germany's involvement had little to do with the moral dimensions of reparations and everything to do with hoped--for trade benefits, specifically most favored nation status. Nevertheless, in 1976 pressure from the United States and Jewish organizations did lead East German leaders to offer a symbolic payment of US $1 million--far less than the amount originally assessed against them by Israel and the Claims Conference or the $100 million the conference later accepted as a basis for negotiations--as "humanitarian" assistance to survivors who were US citizens. They later broached the possibility of paying even more, but consistently denied any East German legal or moral obligation toward these survivors. In the 1980s, the World Jewish Congress became involved in reparations negotiations, and a 1988 visit to the GDR by WJC head Edgar Bronfman, at the invitation of the East German leadership, coincided with increased public attention to Jewish issues, including public commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988, exhibits on Jewish themes, and discussion of Jewish issues in the media. Popular sentiment had it that East German President Erich Honecker was eager for an invitation to the United States. Sharing the antisemitism inherent in the communist rhetoric associating Jews with capitalism and the imperialist west, the East German leadership "clearly overestimated the influence of the Claims Conference in the United States" (141) and "believed that a direct line of influence existed between the World Jewish Congress and the U.S. State Department." (194) This led, as Timm points out, to the irony of Honecker awarding to Bronfman, "an industrialist and manager," the Great Star of International Friendship, one of East Germany's highest honors (194). Though Bronfman did involve himself in attempts to negotiate most favored nation status for East Germany in return for reparations payments, his efforts, like those of the Claims Conference, were unsuccessful. East Germany refused to budge on the basic points of significant monetary payments and acknowledgement of obligation, while the US government ultimately would not link reparations to MFN status. Angelika Timm was herself a scholar of Middle East affairs in East Germany and a proponent of the official, distorted East German version of events in the Middle East. Since reassessing her adherence to the party line in the late 1980s--in part, as she has explained, after having the opportunity to travel to Israel and witness events first handy(7)--she has written widely on East German relations with Jews and with Israel. She also acted as an interpreter at post-1989 meetings between Israeli and East German representatives, and thus brings something of an insider's perspective to this discussion of East German reparations policy. Yet, despite her personal knowledge, careful archival research, and the many interviews she conducted, Timm fails to provide much insight into the humanity and motivations of the protagonists. She refers briefly to tensions between East German diplomats on the ground, who were forced to repeat the same justifications to Jewish negotiators over and over, and their superiors in Berlin, but provides no further details. (134) More extensively, she describes a 1988 visit to the United States by Hermann Axen, a Jewish member of the SED Politburo and a concentration camp survivor. In the course of his visit, Axen delivered a party-line speech on foreign policy to the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies that put some audience members to sleep and elicited derisive laughter from others. Axen's response was bitter, writes Timm, and he "began to speak about his own experience: his brother beaten to death by the Nazis and his parents gassed, Axen decided to build another Germany. Some in the audience felt ashamed after realizing that Axen really believed in a socialist Germany." (137) This incident at least helps to illuminate the unwillingness of Axen and other members of the East German government to "accept any responsibility for Nazi cruelties," (141) however one may feel about its legitimacy as a justification. But such revealing moments are rare and remain largely unexplored in this precise, though at times stilted, chronology of dates, names, and events. Timm also avoids more searching questions about the purpose of reparations in the minds of the Jewish negotiators, particularly in the final year of East Germany's existence. Following the first (and last) free elections in East Germany in March 1990, the new parliament, many of its members GDR-era dissidents, issued a strong statement that reflected a consensus among many East Germans that GDR policy had been terribly wrong. Among other things, the government apologized to Jews everywhere and asked the Israeli people "to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility in the official East German policy toward the Israeli state, to forgive us for the persecution and degradation Jewish citizens were exposed to in our country, even after 1945." (177) The government also repudiated East Germany's support for the United Nation's "Zionism as racism" resolution and agreed to revise textbooks and educate young people about the Holocaust. With its collapsing economy, the country could have offered little in the way of material recompense. It is not clear, then, why Israel made the diplomatic relations sought by the new government, which would have been largely symbolic in any case given the inevitability of unification with the west, contingent upon reparations payments (178). Some discussion of the reasoning behind this--and by implication, of the various strands of moral obligation, material justice, and humanitarian assistance that underlie reparations--would have been useful and welcome. Indeed, some consideration of the purposes and effects of reparations would have added analytic depth to Timm's entire account of the negotiation process. Would East German payment of reparations in the 1970s or 1980s, for example as part of a trade agreement, also have stimulated a domestic reexamination of East Germans' role in the Holocaust and of their attitude towards Israel? Even in West Germany, it was not the payment of reparations but a combination of other factors, including simply the passage of time, that led to the emergence of societal introspection and self-questioning. Material restitution can be negotiated or coerced; acknowledgement of responsibility, atonement, apology cannot. Would the former have been enough without the latter? Given that postunification surveys have actually shown lower levels of antisemitism among eastern Germans than among their western counterparts, and levels of anti-Zionism that do not differ appreciably,(8) are reparations payments at all significant to the process of a society's "coming to terms" with history? Although such questions are now moot in the East German context, they remain important to any discussion of reparations.(9) Angelika Timm's study provides much useful detail, yet its descriptive focus leaves one wishing for deeper exploration of some of the questions it inevitably raises. Notes I would like to thank Elizabeth Breier for assistance in researching this review. (1.) For a breakdown of actual and projected reparations payments as of 1986, see Christian Pross, Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for the Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore, 1998), 216-17. See also Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, 1997), 288. (2.) See, e.g., Nicholas Balabkins, West German Reparations to Israel (New Brunswick, 1971); Benjamin Ferencz, Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation (Cambridge, 1979); Nana Sagi, German Reparations: A History of the Negotiations (New York, 1986); Ludolf Herbst & Constantin Goschler, eds., Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich, 1989); Constantin Goschler, Wiedergutmachung: Westdeutschland und die Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus, 1945-1954 (Munich, 1992); Pross (see note 1). (3.) See Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Anti-Semitism in Germany: The Post-Nazi Epoch since 1945, trans. Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (New Brunswick, 1997), 253-63 for survey data on this issue from the late 1980s. On resistance to reparations, see Pross (see note 1), 1-70. (4.) See, e.g., Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting Terror and State Atrocity (New York, 2001), esp. 170-82; Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Fating History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, 1998), esp. 91-117; Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York, 2000), esp. 119-147. (5.) Heft (see note 1), 150. Heft provides a more nuanced analysis of this period and of the genesis of East German policy toward Jews and Israel. (6.) Timm quotes here from a committee of persecutees in Leipzig in 1945. See also p. 24. This attitude is discussed in greater depth in Heft (see note 1), 80-84. In West Germany, meanwhile, communists were long denied reparations under federal restitution laws; see Gotthard Jasper, "Die disqualifizierten Opfer. Der Kalte Krieg und die Entschadigung fur Kommunisten," in Herbst & Goschler (see note 1), 361-84. (7.) Lars-Broder Keil, "Spate Wende in der Israel-Politik der DDR," Berliner Morgenpost Online, February 8, 2000 (http://www.berliner-morgenpost.de/ archiv2000/000208/politik/story31233.html). (8.) Timm, 197-98; Werner Bergmann, "Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany since Unification," in Hermann Kurthen, Werner Bergmann & Rainer Erb, eds., Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany After Unifaction (New York, 1997), 23-27; Hermann Kurthen, Antisemitism and Xenophobia in United Germany, in ibid., 39-87, esp. 47. (9.) Though the precise issues involved are not identical, the more recent debates surrounding legal action for compensation from Swiss banks and German and other insurance companies and industries have raised related questions about justice, moral and legal obligation, and the effects of reparations negotiations and payments on the societies that are being held accountable. See, e.g., Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Holocaust Reparations--A Growing Scandal," Commentary Magazine, September 2000, and "Gabriel Schoenfeld & Critics, Holocaust Reparations," Commentary Magazine, January 2001; Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations (New York, 2000), 88-111. Review by Belinda Cooper, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Ohio Northern University, Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute |
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