Paper short abstract:

Despite an important memory landscape around German-Jewish history in former East Germany today, Jews don’t recognize themselves in it. Recreating other different memory places, Jews express today a specific heritage and identity, that is wanted without any link and identification to Germany.

Paper long abstract:

The memory landscape of former East Germany today is full of monuments and other memory places commemorating an event of the German-Jewish history. The use of different forms for the memorial places (monuments, steles, commemorative tablets) is a way to transmit and cause many different feelings and emotions about this terrible history to each one. But, as surprising it can be at a first look, Jews in former East Germany today don't feel themselves concerned by this memorial landscape. According to them, this history is not theirs, it's the one of Germans.

Trying to understand this lack of identification, the analyses reveals the existence of another collective memory, the one of those Jews, that express itself through photographies, the Book (namely Torah) or nomination (as it can be put in concrete forms by cemeteries). Such a memory illustrates a specific identity construction, the one of Jews in former East Germany today, that do not identificate themselves with this country and even refuse it, even when they live there.

Even if those Jews have choosen in a way to live in Germany today, the weight of history is too important to be easily gone beyond. At time, the identification to the Jewish people can't fit in with a German identity.