Those Germans who felt indignant about the crimes committed by Germans and for their subsequent lack of contrition sought to construct a political community cleansed of nationalist ideals and values. The radicalism of this project should not be underestimated. It was to recast Germans essentially as European citizens of a republic cut off from the national traditions that led to Auschwitz. These are the Non-German Germans. They were not like the few who converted to Judaism in order to escape their Germanness. Nor did they resemble the German refugees, for whom the professor of German literature Hugo Kuhn coined a new term after he encountered them on his study tour of Australian universities in 1960. “In the concert halls of Melbourne and Sydney, we felt as we used to in Breslau. What a forced-export of cultivated and culture-conscious Germans has gone across the entire globe! Hitler has indeed brought together German and German-conscious Europeans in all the world – but as German Anti-Germans [deutsche Gegen-Deutsche].” This orientation may have even preceded the Nazis: we know from Thomas Mann that a “German self-antipathy” (deutscher Selbst-Antipathie) has existed for more than a thousand years!

Non-German Germans are not to be confused with the so-called “anti-Germans” (Antideutsche) for whom “Germany must die so we can live,” and who insist that “After Auschwitz, we have no right to be German.”