The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust by Kenneth Hart Green (review)

Abstract

Finally, chapter 5 shows how Bukovina was reimagined in literature as a “sunken cultural landscape,” thus replacing earlier notions of “lost Heimat” (203), posing a significant challenge to exclusivist narratives of Bukovinian history and prompting the (re)emergence of ideas of “an exceptional GermanJewish symbiosis in a wider and now lost multicultural Central European world” (204). The author places these developments in the broader context of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), a process that acquired particular importance during the 1970s and 1980s and opened up new spaces for imagining a shared past. However, her final assessment is quite skeptical, as ”the politicization of these issues prevented the experiences—let alone the suffering—of Bukovinians from being realistically evaluated and acknowledged” (234). All in all, this book makes a significant contribution to the field of German Jewish history after the Shoah. Fisher’s focus on Germans and Jews from a particular Central European region proves fruitful for studying the negotiation of postwar belonging in both a comparative and an entangled perspective. While clearly showing that these postwar histories were entangled, she is very much aware of the limits of this reinvention of Bukovina “as the ultimate European and multicultural space” (249). This book gives an important impulse to think further about the continuous entanglement of German and Jewish histories from a historical Central European vantage point, without endorsing alltoojubilant rediscoveries of “GermanJewish symbiosis.”