What was life like for Jews who wanted to return to their former homes in Europe after the Holocaust? In Home after Fascism, Anna Koch draws on a rich array of interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the first-person homecoming stories of Jews in East Germany, West Germany, and Italy and explore the variety of ways they reconnected to the countries that had destroyed their homes, ostracized them, and killed and imprisoned their loved ones.

Even as returning Jews worked to recover lost or looted homes and possessions, they also struggled to make sense of their persecution and find a way to reclaim a sense of home. Essential to that reconnection, Koch argues, was the development of "emotional communities," which helped returnees process and reinterpret their feelings toward the countries they had fled for their lives and safety. Jews in West Germany emphasized detachment and marking their distance to justify living in a "country of murderers"; communists of Jewish origin in East Germany stressed an emotional connection to their comrades; and Italian Jews' emphasis on the historical attachment to their homeland highlighted their belonging within the national community of Italy.

Comparative, wide ranging, and often moving, Home after Fascism? reveals the determined resilience of a displaced generation of Jewish people following different paths across Europe to recover the feeling, reality, and power of home.

About the Author

Anna Koch is DAAD Francis Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European History.

Reviews

"Anna Koch has written a fascinating and differentiated account of the German and Italian Jews who returned to their homelands after World War Two. Closely based on memoirs and archival documentation, Home after Fascism lucidly explores how German and Italian Jews had to redefine notions of home in order to find a place in the countries which had persecuted them."-Bill Niven, Professor Emeritus of Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University

"At once expansive and intimate, Home After Fascism provides a meticulously researched history of the difficulties Jews faced as they tried to recreate their lives immediately after the Holocaust in the very countries that persecuted them. Grounding the study within the distinct memory cultures of Italy, East Germany, and West Germany, Anna Koch's brilliant book is a must read, interrogating how fresh memories of murder and betrayal clashed with individuals' sense of attachment to a language, a place, and a homeland."-Marion Kaplan, author Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal

"What is the meaning of home for people whose homes have been violently destroyed? Using a wealth of primary sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral testimonies, Anna Koch draws on cutting-edge research in memory studies and the history of emotions to bring to life in vivid detail how German and Italian Jews renegotiated the meaning of 'home' in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Carefully researched and brilliantly argued, Home After Fascism is an important and compelling work."-Emiliano Perra, author of Conflicts of Memory: The Reception of Holocaust Films

Book Information
ISBN 9780253066961
Author Anna Koch
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press