Pity Of It All

The purpose of this text is to try to understand how Germany could attempt to exterminate its Jewish population during the Nazi period. Through individual stories, beginning with Moses Mendelsohn in the 1780s and ending with Hannah Arendt, it traces the history of assimilation and the Jewish contribution to German public and cultural life. 

 

Ancient renown; the age of Mendelssohn; miniature utopias; Heine and Borne; spring of nations; hopes and anxieties; years of progress; assimilation and its discontents; war fever; the end.