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The present article explores perceptions and cultural constructions of the terms capitalism or capitalistic West among ex-Soviet, highly qualified Jewish migrants from Russia and Ukraine after their emigration to Germany between 1990 and 1996. It seems that migration offers a unique opportunity to migrants to realise knowledge that is normally taken for granted, behaviour schemes and values, and to reflect on them. How do they acquire such presumed capitalist knowledge of the new society and new social world, how do they create it, and with what concrete contents do they connect the illusion about monolithic cultural, economic and political capital, the illusion which contributes to group formation and which serves as action orientation? As my research shows, immigrants try to disparage much of what appeared to them in the Soviet Union as normative, right and appropriate; now they often act by way of categories, which were defined in the previous context as "capitalist" and were interpreted as immoral. Without exact ideas or knowledge about behaviour codes, unspoken norms and silent values from the new society, many immigrants orient themselves towards the opposite of what was counted as morally proper in the origin society. Simultaneously they revive old system through the establishing and development of a Russian language enclave. Nevertheless this enclave is not located in a vacuum of "dusty" memories from the past, but build transnational cross-border space connected and corresponding to the processes of to-day's CIS and with the life of those relatives and friends who still live there, und with whom the emigrants share intensive social networks.
First as a student of comparative literature with a focus on German and then as a professor of German Studies, I’ve been traveling back and forth to Germany for three decades, almost exactly the age of the reunified German state. I have stayed for weeks, for months, or for more than a year at a time. I have lived in Leipzig, in Cologne, and in Munich, but I have spent by far the most time in Berlin, a place that I have come to consider a second home. Throughout that time, Germany has changed enormously, both demographically and attitudinally. In relation to diversity in general and in its relationship to Jews.
The thesis is a study of the Jewish community of Leipzig, Germany over the course of the 20 th century. It begins with an overview of the Jews of the city until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, emphasizing divisions with the Jewish community over the ideology of Zionism and between German-born and foreign-born Jews. It goes on to describe the lives of Jews as the Nazis come to state authority, the riots of November, 1938, and the gradual exclusion of Jews from professional and pubic life in the city. Jewish responses in education, politics and culture are examined, as are the decisions of many local people to emigrate. After the 1938 riots, exclusion began to shift to extermination, and the Jewish community found itself subject to deportation to camps in Eastern Europe. Most of those deported were murdered. Those who lived were able to do so because of good fortune, canny survival skills, or marriage to non-Jews. Jewish life, which had been an important part of the city, was systematically destroyed. After 1945, those few who survived in the city were joined by another handful of Jewish Leipzigers who survived the camps, and by some non-Leipzig Jews, to reform the Jewish community. A tiny percentage of the old Jewish world of Leipzig was left to rebuild. They did so, reestablishing institutions, reclaiming property, and beginning negotiations with the new authorities, the Soviet occupation and then the German Democratic Republic. The Jews of Leipzig continued some of their old concerns in this new world, negotiating with the government and among themselves the nature of their identities as Jews and as Germans. These negotiations were brought to a halt by a series of anti-Semitic purges in 1952 and 1953. The leadership of the Jewish community fled, as did many of their fellow-Jews. The behavior of the East German state at this point showed some surprising commonality with their Nazi predecessors. After the purges were over, those who remained began another process of rebuilding, this time in constant tension with a government that wanted to use them for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. With the fall of the communist regime in 1989-90, the Jewish community of Leipzig was able to chart its destiny again. The old issues of identity and community--among themselves and between Jews and their German neighbors--continue in a very different context.