Philo‐Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder Von Bern

This article argues that Germany's post‐unification ‘fascination for things Jewish’ (Jack Zipes) may be contextualised within broader debates on German ‘normalisation’. Contemporary philo‐Semitism, it is suggested, draws for the most part on one of two very different re‐imaginings of a highly idealised, if not illusory, German‐Jewish symbiosis destroyed by the Holocaust. On the one hand, we are presented with nostalgia for the Weimar Republic. Here Jews are posited as central to the supposed cosmopolitanism of the early twentieth century. On the other hand, the liberal, universalising spirit of Weimar is contrasted with the ‘German’ particularism embodied by the fierce patriotism of many Jews in the late nineteenth century — the extent to which this German‐Jewish ‘Vaterlandsliebe’ persisted in spite of the consolidation of a newly ‘socially acceptable’ intellectual and political anti‐Semitism is generally overlooked. Subsequently, these two forms of contemporary philo‐Semitism, rooted as they are in two different idealisations of a German‐Jewish symbiosis, are examined in relation to two popular recent films: Max Färberböck's Aimée und Jaguar (1998) and Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstraße (2003). In both cases, it is contended, the sentimentalisation of the part played by German Jews in shaping German identity may, unintentionally, foster the illusion that Germans were also victims of Nazi anti‐Semitism. An analysis of Sönke Wortmann's film Das Wunder von Bern (2003) concludes the article by suggesting that the recent explosion of interest in German wartime suffering more generally represents a worrying intensification of this trend which may ultimately relegate Jewish suffering to the margins.