Jack Goldfrank was uneasy on his way to the German town of Neustadt – the same land his father had been forced to leave in 1933 for fear of Nazi persecution. 83 years old, he still wonders if his parents, gone for decades, would approve of this pilgrimage to their homeland almost a century after their escape.
Upon arriving in Neustadt, Jack and his wife, Jane, were greeted by the Mayor, who announced that they were the second Jewish Americans to return to Neustadt in connection with their family’s history. Welcoming them into his office, he opened what he called “The Book of Remembrances,” with the name of every Neustadt Jew who had fled Nazi persecution from 1933 onwards.
The Mayor then accompanied Jack and Jane to the town’s Jewish cemetery – a burial ground Jack called “not in pristine shape,” but “decent.” “There were a lot of Goldfranks in the cemetery,” Jack tells me. “But the last burial there was in 1937.” No Jews who escaped Nazi persecution had ever returned to live in Neustadt.
Jane adds, “The mayor was very nice. But, in my mind, I’m always remembering that these people, or their parents, were Nazis. It was always like, do they really feel this, or are they doing what they think is right? Does it matter? For me, it was confusing.”
“My big feeling was discomfort,” Jack says.
This trip was the first Jack Goldfrank took on his new German passport after reclaiming his German citizenship in the first months of 2025. This encounter with the mayor of Neustadt would fade in his recollection of the visit, overshadowed by lively memories of Berlin light festivals and museum tours. It wasn’t until sitting with me, his granddaughter, that he and his wife began to revisit the feelings of unease they experienced in Neustadt.
My family is just one of the many American Jewish families that have reclaimed their German citizenship in recent years. Since 2016, the German Consulate in New York City has reported a more than 300% increase in applications for citizenship reclamation, parallel with President Donald Trump’s rise to power. Yet for some Jews who return to Germany generations after their ancestors fled Nazi persecution, the reality reveals that the nation has not moved as far from its past as they once imagined – encountering an overextension of Germany’s “memory culture” around the Holocaust that can manifest in instances of fetishization of Jewish culture and an overperformance of repentance.
Many recipients of reclaimed citizenship are two to three generations removed from the Holocaust themselves; these individuals do not connect reclamation efforts to a traumatic history, but rather an opportunity for smoother travel. Maya Shwayder, a journalist based in New England who reclaimed her citizenship in 2014, said she remembers thinking, “This is great! We can travel so much more easily. This is really, really useful.”
Laura Moser, Texan author and former politician, laughs, telling me, “Why wouldn’t we want a second passport?” Moser continues, “The people who were my generation immediately started applying once we got it because, once you have all the documents and the place, everyone can get it. The older people did not get it right away.”
Jack Goldfrank is only one generation removed from the traumas Nazi Germany inflicted upon his parents, yet for him too “the driving force was really to have the ability to explore other countries pretty easily.” He continues, “My mother and father never talked about their life in Germany, and, shame on me, I never asked them. They never volunteered, and I never raised the issue… I’m not sure if my parents would be proud of what I’ve done, or if they would feel very negative.”
Younger Americans, with a less vivid and recent recollection of the Holocaust, make up the majority of those with reclaimed passports who then decide to move to Germany permanently, mostly for job opportunities or the hope of an improved quality of life. Shwayder and Moser are in their ranks. Sitting in a noisy Berlin cafe, Moser tells me, “There’s definite practical aspects [of living in Germany], like the schools here, and it really does have a functioning social democracy.”
However, upon moving to Germany, Moser did not necessarily encounter the socialized democratic utopia she expected. Instead, she describes a very different reality.
“They fetishize Jews,” she tells me. “The ones who don’t are lying. They’re like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much.’ They feel exonerated… like they’re forgiven. And I’m like…no, I literally just wanted healthcare and like good schools…I don’t volunteer that I’m Jewish anymore.”
Germany often receives praise for the ways in which the nation has memorialized historical wrongs and continues to acknowledge the mass atrocity of the holocaust in their lives. There is even a word for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to “confronting the past.”
American philosopher and Jew who relocated to Germany herself, Dr. Susan Neiman wrote a book in 2019 called Learning from the Germans, making the case that Germany had successfully faced its Nazi past and urging Western countries, the United States in particular, to follow the German example.
However, when I reached out to Dr. Neiman to discuss her thoughts on this topic, she told me that her views, and the world, had changed considerably since she wrote the book. “I’d have never written that book had I not thought that things were getting significantly better,” she says.
In a stark contrast from her previous position, Dr. Neiman tells me that she believes German vergangenheitsbewältigung has gone too far. “It’s to the point that some of them call themselves the perpetrator nation. But, if that’s how you essentialize yourself, then there has to be a victim nation, and that victim nation is the Jews.”
Psychologist Dr. Jasmin Spiegel writes that, “The need for historical ‘closure’ is greater for perpetrator groups, combined with the desire to “get rid of” the guilt…These tendencies are reinforced the less contact (non-Jewish German) people have with minorities (here, Jews in Germany). This lack of contact tends to be the rule rather than the exception in Germany, given its current demographics. In the absence of contact, stronger stereotypes and prejudices as well as a layman’s understanding of history are used to understand “the foreign.”
Therefore, Dr. Spiegel hypothesizes that it is a lack of contact between Jewish community members and Germans that reinforces this idea of fetishization, fueled by stronger stereotypes and prejudices that cannot be disproven by in-person communication.
“All these comparisons between America reckoning with slavery versus German memory culture…” Laura Moser hesitates. “It’s like we, everyone in America, has met a Black person before. Nobody in Germany has met a Jewish person before. So it’s completely a monument culture. It’s just, it’s like they think we are the things on the street… they don’t even engage with diversity.”
Dr. Neiman says it’s not only non-Jewish Germans who display this obsession with Holocaust remembrance. “The people who count as real Jews of the official Jewish community are constantly focusing on the victimhood of the Nazi Period,” she says.
Her words jar me: “The people who count as real Jews of the official Jewish community.” Did that mean that there were fake Jews? Or Jews who didn’t count as part of the “official” community?
Moser, explaining her feelings of relative separation from the Jewish community in Germany, tells me, “Almost all the congregations here are led by Germans who converted…It’s a thing, and I find it really distasteful to sort of adopt this victim’s mentality when their grandparents were literally Nazis.”
When I begin to ask Dr. Neiman about Germans who adopt Jewish identities, she interrupts me. She exclaims, “Oh, the fake Jews? There are lots of them!… Half of the rabbis in the country!”
While I could not find any data to support both Moser and Neiman’s shared claim of a rabbinical space dominated by recent converts, their confident assessment does point to, at the very least, a common feeling of a strong convert presence within Jewish community leadership.
“Who would you rather be, a child of a victim or a child of a Nazi?” Dr. Neiman asks me. “It’s almost to the point where if someone starts really earnestly telling me that their great aunt was Jewish,” she starts nodding uncomfortably and mimes walking away, laughing.
Dr. Spiegel assesses the psychological motivations for what she calls “transgenerational posttraumatic identity confusions.”
“By choosing a victim identity, painful emotions of shame and guilt following the experience of collective trauma on the side of the perpetrators, as well as historical and moral responsibilities, do not need to be dealt with. The gain is the acquisition of a morally unattainable position….Anyone who can take refuge behind the protective shield of a – supposedly – Jewish identity can expect to be unassailable. The moral judgment of those who invent Holocaust victims is essentially a mockery of all those who really were tortured and killed by the Nazis.”
In the 1950s, following the end of World War II, there was a significant uptick in Germans who wanted to convert to Judaism. While there were approximately 25,000 Jews living in former West Germany and only a few hundred in East Germany, thousands of applications were submitted by Germans who Barbara Steiner – historian who penned a book called Die Inszenierung des Jüdischen or “The Staging of Jewishness” – says were burdened by feelings “of guilt and shame and shock” over the Holocaust.
The Central Welfare Board of Jews in Germany reported that, within the past twenty-one years, 1,697 Germans have converted to Judaism.
“You still cannot be there as a rabbi speaking the prayer for remembering Holocaust victims who were murdered, maybe by your own ancestors,” Steiner is quoted as saying in an article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There is definitely a red line…You cannot give this [Nazi] heritage away with a bath in the mikvah,” referring to the ritual conversion bath.
Dr. Neiman describes this phenomenon of the very Germans who once traced their lineage in an attempt to prove they had no Jewish ancestry now scouring their relations for proof of a connection to Judaism, leading to what she calls “these perennial Jew scandals.”
Neiman tells me about several cases in which young Germans claimed Jewish heritage when their ties to Judaism were murky at best.
“There was a big case a couple of years ago, a young writer named Fabian Wolf… he claimed his mother had told him he was Jewish, and it turned out that there was pretty definite proof that he wasn’t, and it turned very nasty…There are just Jew scandals of various kinds that get a lot of attention from the press. And with Fabian, I think people were vicious towards him, but vicious because he took a fair stand on Israel and Palestine.”
Neiman asserts that it is oftentimes the voracity of one’s support for the state of Israel, or rather lack thereof, that accrues media skepticism regarding one’s Jewish identity, rather than the validity of their tie to Judaism itself.
“There are other people, Max Czollek, for example,” Neiman says, “Czollek’s claim to be Jewish is maybe just slightly better… but he explicitly stays out of any questions about Israel and Palestine. He says he’s critical of lots of things in Germany, but he says it’s antisemitic to expect [him] to have an opinion on Israel. Now. I think this is such bad faith…I just don’t think that one can do that when this is a country whose government claims to represent us; you cannot just simply say, “Eh, not my problem.” But anyway, hey, let me prop myself up on just a little bit of Jewish background and not a word on Israel.”
The larger issue of the tie between anti-semitism and protest acts committed by Israel seems to be very prevalent for Jews in Germany, with Germany’s draconian guidelines for protest resulting in the arrest of Jewish Germans for the offense of anti-semitism.
Dr. Neiman explains the irony here, “Polls show that a great majority doesn’t like the German policy towards Israel, which is even more extreme than the U.S. and Trump’s. Okay. So people don’t like it, but they are… It’s just a complete taboo to say anything bad about Israel. And there’s a tendency to embrace any Jew whatever they do or don’t do, unless they criticize Israel.”
Moser tells me that this dichotomy has caused significant discomfort for her during her time in Germany.
“I don’t know how much you followed, but it’s insane. They’re like arresting Jews left and right for nothing. Phrases you can’t say, like from the river to the sea… It’s like, get in jail. They don’t understand…And that’s where they’re equating the anti-Israel with antisemitism. I mean, for millions of reasons, but they don’t really understand… They have no nuanced understanding of what Judaism is or what Jewish people are,” she says. “That’s the thing that’s made me be like, why do I live here? Because these people have not learned anything.”
At the end of our time together, I ask Dr. Neiman the question that to this day plagues me, one that has become glaringly apparent throughout my discussions with American Jews: Can there ever truly be redemption for these historical crimes against humanity?
She laughs. “I’m laughing only because it’s a question that I’m left with, having spent a good…Thank God, not all of my work is about this, but I’ve certainly written two whole books on the subject and thought about it a great deal, and at this point, I don’t know…. And I count as one of the people that ought to have an answer to it, but well, I thought I did…I really did think I had an answer to your question, and I don’t anymore,” she tells me.
Neiman hesitates for a moment. “There’s a nice saying by an Irish professor who suggests we should build a monument to amnesia and forget where we put it.”
Is that really the way forward? Would erasing the past, with its guilt, shame, and persistent need for forgiveness, erase the labelling and fetishization that American Jews feel so deeply in Germany?
When I speak to Maya Schwayder, an American Jew who reclaimed her German citizenship and worked in Berlin for years as a journalist, I ask what it felt like to live as a German there. Without hesitation, she says, “That is something that you and I never will be.”
Can amnesia truly bridge the chasm between “real” and “fake” Jews and between those who are allowed to be German? Or does forgetting simply make this dichotomy more hidden, intensifying barriers that are too etched into Germany’s past and present?
As we leave a Berlin cafe, Moser turns to me to tell me one last thing, “I have no illusions about Germany… I don’t expect anything from the German people… But also, I have my bag packed. I’m not from here. I don’t care. I’m not gonna be, like, weeping over the earth that I was raised on.”
Her grandfather, like my own ancestors, was forced to leave his whole life behind as Nazis stormed Jewish towns, homes, and businesses. He fled to the U.S., ready to begin a new, safe life for his family. How could he know that, about eight decades later, his granddaughter would move to Germany, escaping the threats of fascism seeping into her own home country? And, now, that she would be contemplating leaving Germany once again, with no idea where her next supposed safe haven may be?
“I think there’s something very Jewish about having exit plans,” Moser says. “It’s like keeping your bag packed by the door.”
