In Germany, the public perception of terrorism has been shaped by the fact that the country has largely escaped devastating terrorist attacks. In historical perspective, however, there has been a significant connection to Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which became more internationalized after the Six-Day War, on account of the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the way the media have presented it within the context of postwar German history over the past four decades. This article presents a point-by-point analysis of the media reporting of this attack in order to determine its influence on collective German memory. It also aims to point out the similarities and differences in the German and German-Jewish reporting on the event to establish how these groups’ respective perception of terrorist threats in Germany was shaped by that reporting.

The poetry anthology “Welch Wort in die Kälte gerufen”, published in 1968 in the GDR, is astonishing in its ideological diversity and abundance: it is a collection of 361 poems about the Holocaust written by German-speaking Jewish and non-Jewish writers from all over the world. An examination of the volume’s creation and publishing history highlights how the GDR’s literary and historical policies during the Cold War influenced the publication. The analysis of two poems by Johannes Bobrowski and Louis Fürnberg, by contrast, illustrates the importance of individual and aesthetic aspects of the writing on the Shoah in the GDR beyond any official historical narrative.

An anti-Semitic and nationalistic milieu emerged in Dresden in the last third of the 19th century. It had a fundamental influence on generating a powerful anti-Semitism, as well as on the rise of the regional NSDAP and its ‘Jewish policies’ after 1933. Even though there were relatively few Jews in the city, the National Socialists and their Saxon leader Martin Mutschmann undertook numerous initiatives to eliminate the ‘Jewish problem’. This article traces the fundamentals and practices of National Socialist ‘Jewish policies’ in the Saxon capital of the Gau from 1933 to 1945. These went far beyond the typical deprivation, social exclusion, and persecution of Jewish citizens that developed elsewhere in Germany.

During World War I Eastern European Jewry found themselves on either side of the front, since their homeland had become a theatre of war. As Russian Army leaders regarded the Jews as traitors and spies, they made them scapegoats for their own military failures. The hope that the situation would improve under the Central Powers was only partially fulfilled. Although Jews were no longer charged en masse with espionage, the distrust continued as Jews were still associated with treason, epidemics and prostitution. The war confirmed the anti-Semitic stereotypes of many – with tragic consequences for the future.

After the Russian evacuation in the summer of 1915, the Kingdom of Poland came under the German and Austrian occupation. For the Jews, this meant liberation from the barbarian Russian rule, but the occupiers’ ruthless exploitation of the country contributed to the poverty of the population and to the worsening of the Polish-Jewish relations. However, the occupiers’ liberal cultural policies, their introduction of free municipal and local elections, as well as equal rights for Polish Jews advanced the development of the civil society and the growing political significance of Ostjuden.

Starting with S. M. Dubnov’s “Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten” (1918), the article focusses on (a) the “Judenpolitik” of the German military authorities in Eastern Europe during the First World War as expressed in the “Appeals to the Jews in Poland and Russia”, (b) the activities of German rabbis and religious teachers in the service of the German military authorities in the district of Ober Ost, and (c) the “positive” consequences of this “Judenpolitik”, particularly for the Jews in Vilna, which include the foundation of Jewish schools on the German-Jewish pattern, the foundation of the – later famous – Jewish theatre Vilner Trupe, and the revitalization of the Yiddish press.

This article focusses on the novel Czyściec (Purgatory,1921) by assimilationist writer Aniela Kallas (alias for Aniela Korngut, 1868–1942). Written in the form of woman’s diary from the period of the Great War, the novel diagnoses the war as a turning point in European and Polish history, and acknowledges the new character of the war manifested both in frontline fighting and in the civilians’ circumstances. The work represents the war experience and likewise points to a crisis in the assimilationist movement, that is, marginalization of the Jewish perspective and the turn toward radical Polonization.