In a sidebar to the Bauer Controversy the rationalist Protestant theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany (1807–1876) accused Orthodox Jews of traditionalism and even ritual murder. In the name of humanity, he rejected the Torah as ancient barbarism and promised emancipation only to Reform Jews. Abraham Jakob Adler and other rabbis objected indignantly, seeing in Ghillany the return of the Middle Ages and demanding emancipation as Jews. What remained unnoticed, was that his texts also contained fierce polemics against acculturated Jews. The subject is Ghillany’s antisemitism and the Jewish identity of his critics, both at the transition from pre-modernity to modernity.

This article deals with the question of why, after the Allies liberated the (former) National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community) in 1945, the Federal Republic failed to become a community of responsibility and how the collective denial of reality in Germany, which continues today, can be explained. Moreover, a key issue for me is the question of the biographical after-effects of the Holocaust on the children and grandchildren (“emotional legacies”) of the birth cohorts shaped by German fascism. I present forms of biographical remembrance work that include both the descendants of the victims and of the perpetrators as a possible option for a future culture of remembrance.

The article deals with the situation of Polish architects of Jewish origin in the late 1930s at the Warsaw University of Technology, in the Association of Polish Architects SARP and on the job market. In addition to physical violence, architects of Jewish origin faced exclusion in their own community. And the article describes various forms of discrimination, examples of architects’ attitudes toward anti-Semitism and the perception of the architectural community during this period after World War II.