Israel and Germany, Reconciliation and Memory

Prof. Roni Stauber, Director of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Director of the Diploma Program in Archival and Information Science

Our guest in this new episode is Prof. Roni Stauber. He is an Israeli historian of moden Jewish history, an associate professor in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, a member of the Yad Vashem Scientific Committee, head of the Goldstein-Goren Center for Diaspora Studies, and head of the Certificate Program in Archival and Information Studies. Stauber’s main field is the study of collective memory. He deals with the interplay between politics and diplomacy, and collective memory and historiography with a focus on the formation of Holocaust consciousness in Israel and around the world.

In the past decade, his research has focused primarily on relations between Israel and West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. His book 'The Lesson for a Generation' analyzed the positions that took shape in public thought in Israel in the 1950s regarding the issue of the "Jewish response" to the Holocaust. The book, which won the "Mordechai Ish-Shalom Prize in the History of the Land of Israel" in 2002, discusses the connection between the general worldview of figures and movements who took part in public discourse in Israel in the early years of the state, and their attitude to the ways in which the Jewish public responded during the Holocaust. An English version of the book was published after changes and adjustments under the title: The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s, Ideology and Memory. One of the central issues discussed in these books is the complex attitude of the political establishment in Israel to the memory of the Holocaust. On the one hand, the state emphasized the connection between the Holocaust and the revival; on the other hand, the power of the traumatic memory, which affected both society and the political establishment, clashed with the ideology of "statehood" and the desire to establish a "normal" society concerned with security, creativity, and construction. The validity of the claim regarding the complex attitude of the Israeli establishment to the memory of the Holocaust Stauber examined in his research on Israeli-German relations in the years 1953–1965. His latest book, Diplomacy in the Shadow of Memory: Israel and West Germany, 1953–1965, was published in 2023 and an English edition is forthcoming. A series of articles by him, discussing various aspects of these relations, were published in Hebrew, English and German journals. His research is based on extensive archival material, some of which has only been uncovered in recent years in archives in Israel, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.

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