Introduction

Jewish exile from National Socialist Germany has not featured prominently in German memory culture until recently. One reason for this was a tendency to regard those who had escaped the Holocaust (before or after it began) as “lucky,” and therefore somehow less worthy of remembering than those who had been murdered. It also had to do with avoiding awkward questions about how Germans in the prewar years of Hitler's rule had reacted to what was effectively the forced emigration of a part of the population. The process of exile raised questions about tacit agreement with the Nazis’ antisemitic policies, about profiteering from the dispossession of the Jews, or about indifference. The emigration of Jews, as well as their deportation during the Second World War, began within German communities and was witnessed by these communities. While Auschwitz already became a focus of German memory culture in the 1970s, becoming central to that culture at the latest by the 1990s, remembering the extermination camps could also be instrumentalized to imply that guilt for the Holocaust resided purely with the murderous SS: it was then easier to overlook the complicity of ordinary German civilians. This complicity, however, has very much become an issue in the last decades, as the intense German reception of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's study Hitler's Willing Executioners demonstrates. When the Kindertransport did find its way into German exhibitions and memorialization, we argue, it was framed very much in terms of the increasing exclusion of Jews from German society after Hitler's accession to power, the impact of Reich Pogrom Night, the increased pressure to emigrate, the pain of separating children from their parents, and the subsequent murder of family members who did not escape in the Holocaust. The emphasis was on German culpability for forcing parents into a decision to send their children away, and for then killing members of their wider families not fortunate enough to escape before the Holocaust.

In their seminal writings on cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider present Germany as one of the countries in which national Holocaust memory has merged with a transnational memory culture centering on global human rights.