This week, the Centre welcomed Lorena de Vita (Utrecht), whose work on postwar German-Israeli relations formed the basis of her talk entitled ‘Democracy, morality, pragmatism: The 1952 agreement between Germany and Israel’. You can read Rosalind Parr’s seminar report below and you can also listen to a short interview Emile Chabal did with Lorena about how she first became interested in this research topic.
[audiomack src=”https://audiomack.com/song/csmch-edinburgh/lorena-de-vita-talks-to-emile-chabal-about-her-work-on-german-israeli-relat”]Lorena de Vita’s work examines the history of International Relations between Israel and ‘the two Germanys’ in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War. Although East and West employed radically different approaches, de Vita nevertheless includes them in a common frame – a historiographical innovation which, amongst other things, offers insights into the globally-wrought framework on which German-Israeli relations rested.
In her paper, de Vita examined the 1952 agreement through which the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) paid Wiedergutmachung (‘reparations’, literally ‘making good again’) to Israel following the Holocaust. The overlapping rivalries between East and West Germany on the one hand, and between Israel and its Arab neighbours on the other, form the background to this diplomatic episode. As de Vita demonstrated, the agreement contributed to the FDR’s self-representation as a stable, responsible democracy on the world stage. In doing so, the new FDR made a conscious bid to differentiate itself from both ‘the Germany of the past and the Germany of the East.’
By 1949, Israel was reeling under austerity, inflation and the arrival of a new wave of refugees created by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Official boycotts prevented economic or political links with Germany but a series of secret missions took place to assess the willingness of either West or East to negotiate on the subject of shilumim (‘payments’), as well as to consider the possibility of trade links. Meanwhile, Chancellor Adenauer signalled the FDR’s willingness to ‘make good again’ by publicly pledging ten million German Marks in reparations. This laid claim, not only to the FDR’s new democratic credentials, but to its status as the real representative of Germany.
As de Vita explained, the issue could not be resolved so easily. When the Israeli parliament met to discuss whether to start official talks with the FDR, there were violent protests. After negotiations had begun, they were disrupted by explosive parcels sent by Jewish terrorists opposed to the talks. There were voices of dissent, too, on the German side amid suggestions that the FDR’s relations with Israel could undermine trading opportunities elsewhere. In Jakarta, the German Ambassador objected on the grounds that the FDR had already paid out to individual Jewish claimants. Meanwhile, the FDR had unfulfilled financial obligations to the Allies, making it difficult for the German government to commit to specific figures despite Adenauer’s earlier pledge.
As de Vita pointed out, pressure came from elsewhere too. While the British and United States governments urged Adenauer not to let the talks fail, the Arab League was deeply opposed to the prospect of payments to Israel, fearing they would boost Israeli military might. One fascinating dimension of the FDR-Israeli agreement is how, in March 1952, Arab states became prominent players in the story of FDR-GDR rivalry when delegations from the two German governments arrived simultaneously in Cairo for negotiations, raising the question of who represented Germany on the world stage.
Amid these multiple tensions, a clear theme of the paper was the history of human connections between the FDR and Israel. Over the course of the negotiations, a German and an Israeli delegate discovered, on the basis of a common accent, that before the war they had attended the same school and shared a favourite teacher.
Commenting on the paper, Stephan Malinowski was impressed by the multiple levels of analysis, ranging from domestic agendas to regional rivalries and global connections. This was something that was further discussed in the Q&A session that followed. Malinowski also provided fascinating insight into the ‘monster word’ Wiedergutmachung, drawing our attention to the subtle connotations of the term. Finally, he raised the question of the reparations model, prompting a thoughtful response from de Vita about the morality of reparations in the international postcolonial context.
De Vita’s research on the agreement between the FDR and Israeli forms part of a wider project on Israel-German relations. We look forward to the book’s publication!
Rosalind Parr is PhD student in History. Her research interests are located in transnational and global histories of the twentieth century, particularly through the lenses of South Asian and gender history. Her thesis examines the international activities of Indian nationalist women in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. She is an affiliated student of the CSMCH