German City, Jewish Memory - (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry) by Nils Roemer (Paperback)

About the Book

A remarkable, in-depth study of Jewish history, culture, and memory in a historic and contemporary German city

Book Synopsis

German and Jewish ways of life have been interwoven in Worms, Germany, for over a thousand years. Despite radical changes brought about by expulsion of Jews, wartime devastation, social advancement, cultural and religious renewal, and the Jewish community's destruction during the Holocaust, the Jewish sites of Worms display a remarkable degree of continuity, which has contributed to the development of distinct urban Jewish cultures, memories, and identities. Tracing the recollection and invention of local Jewish historical traditions in religious commemorations, historical writings, museums, and historical monuments, and the transformation from "sites" to "sights" in the form of tourism from the Middle Ages to the present, Roemer's rich study of Worms offers a blueprint for historians interested in developing similar studies of cities over the longue durée.

Review Quotes

"Roemer's well-written, meticulously researched monograph, supplemented by 45 evocative illustrations and an extensive bibliography (including interviews with former inhabitants), integrates this puissant legacy within Jewish and German history. It examines the destruction and dispersion under the Third Reich and details Worms's rebirth as a memory site after WW II, explicating the complex course of memory, artifacts, and representation between their local origins and the outside world. . . . Recommended."-- "Choice"

"The city focused on by Nils Roemer in German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms was one of many where Hebrew flourished in the Middle Ages, at least in the work of its local celebrity. Roemer's interest is in the continuities between the medieval city and its modern instantiations, and relations between Jews and Germans, before and after the tragedies of the Holocaust."-- "Tablet Magazine"

"The last chapters, describing Jewish attitudes towards the city of Worms in the post-Holocaust period, are particularly moving and fascinating. Besides academic collections that focus on Jewish history (medieval and modern), synagogues with interest in books on the Holocaust and about Jewish life in post-war Germany will be enriched by this book."-- "Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter"

"Worms's long and exceedingly complex historical legacy is deftly recovered and expertly analyzed by Nils Roemer in his erudite new book. After wonderfully summarizing the medieval days of devotion to Torah, pietism and unprecedented acts of martyrdom during the First Crusade of 1096, Roemer turns his attention to the long and shifting history of how the community of Worms became a central, if largely symbolic, element in German-Jewish collective memory. . . . Roemer's book is the most original work I have yet to read on German-Jewish intellectual history. . . . A wonderfully sensitive thinker and gracious writer, Roemer has produced an utterly original study in the uses, and misuses, less of history than of memory; for beyond his thorough assessment of earlier historians' treatments of Jewish Worms, he examines a wide array of less conventional sources. Indeed, among the book's many merits is that it ignores no useful source for its subject."-- "The Forward"

About the Author

NILS ROEMER is associate professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Texas, Dallas.