Germany On Their Minds

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable-whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

Anne C. Schenderlein is managing director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin. After receiving her doctorate in modern European history at the University of California, San Diego, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC from 2015 to 2019. She is co-editor, with Paul Lerner and Uwe Spiekermann, of Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).