Germany - A Different History from the 18th Century to Today

Jews in Germany have often experienced revolutions and wars, national and democratic movements, the founding of the Empire, and reunification differently than their non-Jewish contemporaries. Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov tells German history for the first time consistently from a Jewish perspective. The voices of well-known writers such as Heinrich Heine and Stefan Zweig can be heard, as well as those of unknown observers of Germany's path to nationhood, democracy, and dictatorship, during wartime and the post-war period. It is a fascinating journey through an "alternative" history that allows us to view the present in a new light.

Shulamit Volkov masterfully weaves together various Jewish perspectives on revolutions and wars, political movements and ideologies, social and economic conditions into a new image of German history. She lets us see the Enlightenment through the eyes of Moses Mendelssohn, the Congress of Vienna from the perspective of Jewish delegations, and the Revolution of 1848 from the viewpoint of the victims of anti-Jewish riots. The Liebermann and Rathenau families experienced the Imperial era, World War I, and the beginning of the Weimar period differently than non-Jewish Germans. Bertha Pappenheim, Käte Frankenthal, and Hannah Arendt give their own contours to the interwar period. Special attention is paid to the Holocaust, World War II, and the decades that followed, during which Fritz Bauer and Ignatz Bubis critically reflected on the era of economic miracle and German unity. In her concise book, Shulamit Volkov brings together German and German-Jewish history in such a way that they ultimately appear inseparable.

The first German history from a Jewish perspective
A view of Germany through the eyes of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hannah Arendt, Käte Frankenthal, and others.