Helmut Walser Smith, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory after the Holocaust

“Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory after the Holocaust” offers a new account of how Germans came to terms with the Nazi past—not in the familiar arenas of high politics, intellectual debate, or major cities, but among ordinary people in the small towns and villages where most Germans lived after 1945. Focusing on places where Jewish communities once existed, it argues that confronting the past was not solely a German undertaking. From the start, this process unfolded through sustained engagement with Jewish survivors who returned, refugees who wrote back, and emigrants who revisited the communities from which they had been expelled. Seen from this perspective, German memory emerges as a transnational history, linking local communities with Jewish diaspora networks in Haifa, New York, São Paulo, and elsewhere. Jewish return, in this account, was not merely incidental but constitutive of German memory itself.
Drawing on state and local archives on three continents, the book reconstructs post-Holocaust encounters in a handful of towns and villages in southwest Germany. Using letters, local records, unpublished memoirs, and oral testimonies, it traces how ordinary people—Jewish and German—established basic truths about the Holocaust, marked and commemorated these truths, and forged a shared, if contested, local memory of persecution in “our hometowns.” Rather than asking what should have been done, the book examines what people actually did. Its chapters, structured as microhistories, are written to read like short stories for an academic crossover audience. By shifting attention to the early postwar decades, it shows how memory work unfolded unevenly: in some places encountering indifference or resistance, in others giving rise to forms of collaboration and recognition that reshaped local understandings of the past.

Recommended Reading

Smith, Helmut Walser. The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town. W.W. Norton, 2002. German: Die Geschichte des Schlachters: Mord und Antisemitismus in einer deutschen Kleinstadt. Translated by Udo Rennert. Wallstein, 2002. Paperback, Fischer, 2004.
–. The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2008. German: Fluchtpunkt 1941: Kontinuitäten der deutschen Geschichte. Translated by Christian Wiese. Reclam, 2010.
–. Germany: A Nation in its Time; Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000. Liveright, imprint of W.W. Norton, 2020. German: Deutschland: Geschichte einer Nation; Von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart. Translated by Andreas Wirthensohn. C.H. Beck, 2021.

Kolloquium, 15.09.2026

Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory, 1945–2000

In small-town Germany, when did memory of the Holocaust begin, who was involved in it, and how did it unfold?

These are central questions asked in “Our Hometowns: Jewish Return and German Memory, 1945–2000”—a transnational story of postwar conflict and cooperation between Jews and local non-Jewish Germans in establishing, marking, and preserving the local truth about the Holocaust. Focusing on the experience of a handful of small towns and villages in southwest Germany, the book considers how Germany built its memory culture from the ground up and with the extensive help of its former Jewish citizens.

This is a work of microhistory. It is also a work of transnational history. The epilogue, which is the focus of this talk, brings these microhistories—archivally based short stories—together and raises fundamental questions about the very categories we use to explain “German memory.”

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Smith, Helmut Walser (München, 2021)

Deutschland : Geschichte einer Nation : von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart Germany. A nation in its time: before, during, and after nationalism, 1500-2000

Smith, Helmut Walser (Cambridge [u.a.], 2008)

The continuities of German history : nation, religion, and race across the long nineteenth century