Exile Dreams: Antifascist Jews, Antisemitism and the ‘Other Germany’

This article examines the meanings antifascist German Jews invested in antifascism and highlights its role as an emotional place of belonging. The sense of belonging to a larger collective enabled antifascist Jews to hold onto their Germanness and believe in the possibility of an ‘other Germany’. While most German Jewish antifascists remained deeply invested in their home country in the 1930s, this idea of the ‘other Germany’ became increasingly difficult to uphold in the face of war and genocide. For some this belief received the final blow after the end of the Second World War when they returned and witnessed the construction of German states that fell short of the hopes they had nourished while in exile. Yet even though they became disillusioned with the ‘other Germany’, they remained attached to antifascism.

Zweig asserted that since Jews lacked the power and means to defend their rights 'only antifascism and democracy could guarantee Jewish existence' .2 Jewish leftist intellectuals, Zweig further argued, had formed an alliance with the working class parties, 'from which, as it should be, both sides benefitted, and which we upheld, we and the workers -their names and ours stand together like brothers on the casualty lists.'3 Referring to his book as a 'Kampfbuch' [fight-book], Zweig perceived the fight against antisemitism as a crucial part of his antifascist fight against Nazism.
Like Zweig, other German Jewish leftist intellectuals joined the antifascist cause. However, in contrast to Zweig, many of them did not consider their Jewishness as a central component of their antifascism. They fled the country as political activists, not as Jews, even if they knew that their Jewish origin put them at additional risk.4 These German Jewish antifascists were persecuted both for their politics as well as for their ethnic origin. They shared a leftist, socialist worldview, but they differed in their political opinions. Many German Jewish antifascists allied themselves with communism, others supported the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands [spd; Social Democratic Party of Germany], again others were critical of both the social democrats and communists.5 Among those who joined the Communist Party, attitudes towards the party shifted and their understanding of the antifascist struggle did not always follow the official party line. To avoid reducing antifascism to a simplistic definition, this article examines a range of ideas, sentiments, and hopes.6 In its essence, antifascism constituted a negation of fascism and everything it stood for. If Nazism meant exclusion and persecution of Jews, antifascism promised inclusion and protection for those Nazism rejected. Thus, building on Anson Rabinbach's understanding of antifascism as 'less an ideology than a mentalité, more of a habitus than a doctrine' ,7 this article reveals the ways in which antifascism could provide German Jews with a place of belonging.
Literature on Germans in exile tends to divide historical subjects into two distinct groups: on the one hand, the Jewish refugees; on the other, the political emigrants. Antifascist Germans of Jewish origin are often subsumed under the category of political emigrants and their Jewishness is considered as of little relevance, if it is noted at all.8 Yet their Jewishness clearly affected their lives, and Nazism posed a different threat to them than it did to non-Jewish leftists. While some, like Zweig, turned to antifascism to fight antisemitism, others underestimated antisemitism and misjudged the role it played within Nazi ideology. Individual perspectives were shaped by the discussions and particular discourses in the various places of exile. Antifascist Jews' understanding of antisemitism also changed over time as the extent and drive of Nazi persecution became clearer. Responses also depended on how strongly these antifascist intellectuals self-identified as Jewish, and to an extent the notion 'the more radical the Marxist, the less interested in the specificity of the Jewish question' holds true.9 Existing literature tends to dismiss leftists' readings of antisemitism as misguided and blinded by Marxism.10 Yet antifascists were not unique among German Jews in underestimating Nazi antisemitism. For most, the direction in which Nazi persecution was headed became clear only in hindsight.11 In fact antifascist German Jews warned early on -and more vehemently than others -about the danger that Nazism posed to Jews. A reading that reduces their responses to their focus on economics, which admittedly meant they underplayed other factors, makes us miss the effort of antifascists to publicize and condemn Nazi antisemitism and prevents us from trying to understand antifascist Jews' particular perspectives and predicaments.
Others have written about German Jews' responses to Nazism, but the historical actors in this study differ from the mostly liberal, Zionist or Orthodox Jews in regard to the Jewish question.12 They neither considered building a state in Israel a solution, nor did they believe in integrating and assimilating into a bourgeois, capitalist society. They largely perceived antisemitism as a problem that needed no particular attention, but rather would be solved as part of their fight against capitalism and against the oppression and exploitation of the working class.13 These leftist Jews were drawn to communism and socialism because of the promise of community, equality, and universalism, and in some cases because they wished to overcome Jewish particularity.14 As the Nazis gained power and leftist Jews witnessed the violent attack on left-wing activists, Social Democrats, union officials, and communists, they saw the need to fight back, not primarily as Jews, but as part of a broader antifascist front, forming a universal and not a particular response.15 Writer and literary critique Alfred Kantorowicz remembered that upon joining the communist party he felt relieved, 'not to be facing the threat alone, but to go into action against it in the company of brave, selfless, true companions. ' In the early days of his exile the mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel, a pacifist and socialist from a Jewish family who had written widely against rightwing political murders in the Weimar Republic, contributed an article to the Freie Presse, a socialist Amsterdam exile publication, highlighing his belief in this antifascist front. He wrote, 'For socialists of all shades, this must be a great reminder of the need for unity. With provisional restraint -not blurring -of contrasts, fully conscious of the difficulty of the fight, within and outside the German shackles, they uniformly put the central thought in the foreground: Down with fascism!'17 Envisioning themselves part of a broader antifascist collective that included many non-Jewish Germans shaped antifascist Jews' relation to their German homeland. Their antifascism opened the possibility to define Germanness in contrast to the Nazis' appropriation of the term and support the ideal of an 'other' , antifascist Germany. Antifascism allowed these leftist Jews to hold onto their Germanness at a time when they were violently excluded from the national community and enabled them, at least in their imagination, to shape the future in their home country. From their vantagepoint in exile, they fought for their German homeland, a perspective that separated them from other Jews.
After the Second World War, many of these antifascist Jews returned to Germany to rebuild their home country. However, their belief in an 'other Germany' , already increasingly difficult to uphold during their years in exile, was frequently dashed when they faced the postwar realities of the two emerging German states. For many of these antifascist Jews, whether fellow travelers, party members or dissenters, their hopes for a future, better Germany, did not materialize, neither in the East nor the West. Yet while they became disillusioned with the 'other Germany' , they remained attached to antifascism

Fighting Antisemitism
In August 1933, a group of antifascist writers in their Parisian exile, among them Alfred Kantorowicz  The authors of The Brown Book took Nazi hate speech seriously, and they appeared acutely aware of the danger that Nazism posed to the country's Jewish population. They listed incidents in which Nazis physically attacked and murdered Jews, highlighting that these 'are cases in which the victims were murdered primarily because they were Jews, not because they were "Marxists".'21 Working within a Marxist framework, they perceived Nazi antisemitism as 'an old practice of the ruling class to distract the attention of the people from their actual sufferings' , and imagined that 'Jewish capitalists' would be safe from Nazi terror.22 Yet they did not marginalize Nazi antisemitism. Rather, they emphasized the centrality of 'antisemitism as one of the Foundations of National Socialism.'23 While they misread the motivations and central drive behind Nazi antisemitism, they also warned of the immense threat that Nazism posed to Jews when many liberals in Germany and elsewhere still diminished it. In 1936 Lilly Korpus, a German writer, journalist, and communist activist of Jewish origin published a collection titled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Ausrottung von 500000 dt. Juden [The yellow spot: The extermination of 500000 German Jews], one of the first works to document the Nazi persecution of Jews.24 The book includes photographs from Nazi publications, such as Der Stürmer, depicting social exclusion and public humiliation. In the book's preface, the German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger went beyond an economist reading, stating that these attacks were not merely due to 'economic, social and political motives . . . [they] happen because of deep enmity against reason, out of sheer delusion, out of pure joy in brutality in the defilement of human dignity, in the humiliation of the other out of hatred.'25 Next to chapters such as 'Jew-free Economy' and 'Jews in Concentration Camps' , Der Gelbe Fleck, contains also a chapter titled 'The other Germany' . The chapter contrasts Nazi antisemitism with the reactions of the German population who are portrayed as rejecting the anti-Jewish policies. Feuchtwanger wrote also the preface for the Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, published in 1934, and here the German people are likewise depicted as dissenting Nazi violence. Feuchtwanger asserted 'that were these murders [murders of Jews and political opponents listed in the Second Brown Book] known to them, the German people, even from their deep present humiliation would rise and sweep away Herr Hitler and his associates with anger and abhorrence.'26 While portraying virulent Nazi antisemitism, German Jewish antifascists underestimated its popular support.27 They tended to distinguish between Nazis and ordinary Germans, externalizing both Nazism and antisemitism as not representing the 'true Germany' .28 When they fled the country in the early 1930s, most Jewish (like non-Jewish) antifascists embraced the notion of an 'other Germany' , 'better Germany' that 24 The Nazi crimes.' He further claims that the Germans 'might well be called . . . the least antisemitic in the world.'32 This belief in the lack of antisemitism among Germans went hand in hand with his conviction that many Germans did not support Nazism.33 Fraenkel lived alongside many Jewish refugees in the British camp but he discounted their accounts of experiences in Nazi Germany.34 He correctly assumed that most Jewish refugees did not wish to return to Germany, thus understood their depictions as not 'not particularly instructive' for his book and focused on conversations with non-Jewish as well as Jewish political activists from different leftist camps. Like Fraenkel also other political emigrees were fast to dismiss the 'bourgeois' perspective of unpolitical Jewish refugees who they believed had left Germany for economic rather than idealistic reasons.35 Having fled Germany early on, antifascist German Jews often remained unaware of the open hostility and social ostracism that Jews who had stayed in Germany experienced, thus misjudging public antisemitism. Yet even decades later, scholars of Nazi Germany continue to discuss the initial support of Nazi antisemitism, and the respective role of coercion, indoctrination, manipulation and enthusiasm in its acceleration.36 If assessing how antisemitic Germans were, and how and why their support of the regime's anti-Jewish measures developed remains difficult even with hindsight, it was considerably more challenging for contemporaries who examined the situation from outside the country, and who had often left as early as 1933.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Fraenkel was not alone in not merely underestimating Germans' antisemitism but in depicting the Germans as the 'least Neumann continued to see antisemitism as manipulated from above, even as he learned about the extermination of European Jews.38 While he argued in later writings that 'Anti-Semitism has been, from the very foundation of the Nazi party, the most constant single ideology of the Nazi party' , he reiterates the spearhead theory formulated in Behemoth, perceiving the persecution of Jews as merely the starting point of Nazi violence. He writes, 'not only Jews fall under the executioner's ax but countless others of many races, nationalities, beliefs, and religions. Anti-Semitism is thus the spear-head of terror. The extermination of the Jews is only the means to the attainment of the ultimate objective, namely the destruction of free institutions, beliefs, and groups.'39 This reluctance to address the particularity of Jewish suffering under the Nazis syncs with the emphasis of a collective, antifascist fight against Nazism, avoiding a specifically Jewish perspective.
During the war, antisemitism became a central interest of the Frankfurt school.40 In the late 1930s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno began a vast research project on antisemitism, which went beyond their previous My mother was there standing on the little balcony decorated with geranium boxes. She was waiting for me. How young she looked, mother, much younger than me. How dark her straight hair was compared with mine. Mine would already soon be grey, while not one grey strand could be seen running through hers. She stood there, content and upright, destined for the hard work of family life with the usual ordinary joys and troubles, and surely not for an agonizing, horrible end in a remote village to which she had been banished by Hitler.49 Seghers has been chided for disregarding 'the tragedy of German Jewry' , and for merging all deaths, whether German victims of bombings or murdered Jews in her story.50 Yet Seghers distinguishes between the non-Jewish German characters, showing the extent to which the choices they make contribute to the deportation and murder of Seghers's mother, the Jewish teacher, and a Jewish classmate.51 While she does not regard all deaths the same, Seghers, in the story as well as in her later letters, remembers those who resisted Nazism alongside the Jewish victims, perceiving their fate and fight as linked.52 Her personal memories of the mother she could not save merge with a depiction of the violent destructive power of the fascist regime that changed her former classmates, and German society at large. Like Seghers, Alfred Kantorowicz tried to get a visa for his elderly father who had remained in Nazi Germany but failed to get him out of the country in time. At the end of the war, before his return to Germany, Kantorowicz wrote a short essay about his father. He depicts him, lovingly, as bourgeois, conservative, politically naïve, stereotypically German, and as a thoroughly decent man. In the brief text, Alfred writes about the meetings and exchanges between him and his father after his flight from Germany in 1933, describing his various attempts to convince his father to leave as well. He receives a last letter in fall 1941 and then nothing until after the end of the war when he gets the news from an acquaintance who was deported to Theresienstadt together with his father that the latter died there in Spring 1944. Months later Alfred None of these three writers addresses their parents' Jewishness in their memorial texts; Victor's reference to the prayer book may be a hint, but he does not elaborate further. While the reader will know that their parents were murdered for being Jewish from the context, Seghers, Kantorowicz and Victor do not depict the death from a Jewish viewpoint, or as part of a larger Jewish fate, but rather portray them as victims of fascist racism. Above all, however, these are personal stories of loss. They write about them as their parent -Seghers describing her mother waiting for her; Kantorowicz depicting his father's worry for his son, and his last wish that he would live well, Victor pointing to his mother missing her children and to his picture on the wall. Scrutinizing their texts for the extent to which they acknowledged 'the tragedy of German Jewry' , we can easily overlook how deeply Nazi persecution affected antifascists of Jewish origin. While they maintained a self-understanding as atheists who had broken with Jewish religion and tradition, these antifascist Jews highlighted their connection to family members who became victims of Nazim's genocidal policies. They grieved as daughters, as sons, as friends, as relatives for those who the Nazi had murdered for being Jewish.55 Awareness of the murder of Europe's Jews did not lead them to embrace Judaism as a religion or change, in most cases at least, their self-understanding as political exiles. However, when they became aware of the extent of the persecution of European Jews, many felt the wish to voice solidarity with Nazism's main victims.56 The murder of German Jews and the passivity with which most Germans watched as the Nazis steered the country towards war and genocide, complicated their feelings towards and perceptions of their home country and its population. During the Second World War the question of German guilt became crucial in the debate among antifascists, and many increasingly saw the German people as implicated.57 At a meeting of the Allies Inside Germany Council, a British organization that supported the German antifascist resistance,58 held in London in March 1943, Jürgen Kuczynski, a German economist from a Jewish family and a communist party member since 1930, commented on the question of guilt: Never in the history of mankind has a people borne so heavy an historic guilt, and never has a people counted among its sons and daughters so many criminals. That is the appalling evil which Fascism has brought to the German people, that is the reason why we German antifascists, who have grown up as sons and daughters of this people, feel a special hatred for Fascism. For Fascism has done something to us which it has not done to anyone else: It has robbed us of our people.59 His sense of loss becomes prevalent in his speech. Still, at this point, Kuczynski, like many others set hopes in the 'small opposition which is growing'; still he hoped the German people would overthrow the regime, still he claimed fascism had 'robbed' them of the German people rather than blaming Germans for following Nazism.60 Eventually, however, for many the belief in an 'other, true Germany' became increasingly difficult to uphold. The letters from Alfred Kantorowicz to his friend, mentor and fellow writer Heinrich Mann show the former's growing disillusion. In July 1941, he wrote, 'it will be up to the German people, to choose between rise in socialism or decline in barbarism. To make this comprehensible to the Germans will be our great task.'61 Two years later, in December 1943 he sounded less hopeful, 'The Nazi venom' , he explained to Mann, 'has eaten deep into the body and mind of this people and years of unprecedented effort will be necessary to remove it.'62 He no longer perceived Germans as unaffected from Nazi ideology. A few months later he conceded, 'we know that we won't return to another Germany with flying colours. The other Germany, that we talked about, that we hoped for, is buried under the rubble.'63 Many antifascists, like Kantorowicz, felt increasingly disillusioned and came to terms with the fact that the Germany they defended no longer existed. They thought they voiced the repressed desires of a population who by and large had never shared their views. In spite of their hopes Germans did not mount any significant resistance to the regime. They slowly realized that the German people would stubbornly defend the murderous regime to its last breath.

Postwar Disillusions
In spite of the disappointment that their fellow Germans failed to resist, a significant number of communists and antifascists of Jewish origin chose to return to their home country after the war. Some made the decision with trepidation as Kantorowicz who wrote of his 'black fears' .64 Spreading anticommunism 60 Ibid. They understood the effort to come to terms with the past as crucial to building a better Germany in the present.70 Rather than highlighting the uniqueness of antisemitism, they continued to perceive the persecution from a universalist perspective, highlighting the danger of oppression of any group on racist grounds.
While most had become more suspicious of the German population, they believed in the communist and antifascist leadership and still felt a sense of belonging within the larger antifascist collective. Alexander Abusch, looking back to the days when he had first arrived in Berlin after the war, remembered that 'when Paul Merker [a fellow communist remigrant] and I took the subway to the House of the Central Committee in order to report back to Comrade Wilhelm Pieck . . . I felt finally, finally, at last, home again.'71 The artist Lea Grundig who returned from Tel Aviv referred to the party as her 'true home' . 72 Similarly, Walther Victor, who returned to East Germany in 1947 and joined the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [sed; Socialist Unity Party of Germany] in the same year, explained that the working-class movement had become his home. 73 Yet for some of these returnees the hopes they set in building this antifascist home in the Eastern part of Germany did not pan out. After his return to East Berlin Alfred Kantorowicz founded the cultural-political journal Ost und West, which, as the title suggests, wanted to form a bridge between intellectuals of both camps as well as allow for voices that were critical of policies on both sides. The journal also aimed to introduce German audiences to German exile literature and, by publishing emigrants' experiences, to the antifascist struggle. 74 In late 1949, the magazine closed, officially because of financial difficulties, though it was really the journal's emphasis on building bridges between East and West that made it unappealing in the eyes of the sed leadership. 75 After the journal's closure, Kantorowicz assumed a position as professor of literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which he held until he left East Germany in 1957. In an article published in the West German newspaper Die Zeit after his flight, he described the 'painful process of my progressive disillusionment' .76 After his escape, Kantorowicz fashioned himself as a victim of Stalinism and a long-time opponent of repressive aspects of the regime.77 Yet what exactly led him to remain supportive of the regime as long as he did as well as his motivations for the final break elude us, and his relationship with party and state powers was more muddled than his later descriptions suggest.78 Other antifascist Jews had already left earlier, many of them in the wake of the 1952 purges when public anti-Jewish rhetoric became prevalent in the gdr. The campaign formed part of a larger wave of party purges that swept the Eastern bloc in the early 1950s and targeted those returning from Western exile, many of them Jews, as 'internationalist' , 'Trotskyists' , and 'cosmopolitans' .79 The ties they had built to communities and people in their various places of exile, which had played a crucial role in the global struggle against fascism, rendered them now suspicious. In response to party examinations, arrests and antisemitic attacks in the press (officially depicted as anti-Zionism), more than four hundred Jews fled the gdr in early 1952, among them several members of the communist party.
In his diary Kantorowicz depicted and condemned the antisemitic campaign: 'This -this is monstrous. This is Streicher's language, Himmler's attitude, the atmosphere of the Gestapo interrogations . . . the "morality" of the murderers of Dachau and Buchenwald, of those who gassed people in Auschwitz and Maidanek.'80 But other Jewish antifascist intellectuals perceived it in a different light. Replying to a letter from fellow writer Lion Feuchtwanger who looked with some concern from his Californian exile to the developments in East Germany, Arnold Zweig reassured his friend 'there can be no racial hatred in a place where the fight between the classes . . . has been resolved.'81 Now, as he had two decades earlier, Zweig linked class struggle and antifascism to the fight against antisemitism: 'As far as we are concerned; we who have always experienced the fight against antisemitism as part of our antifascist resistance, we still feel well in our skin and at home here in the gdr.'82 For Kantorowicz, in contrast, the dream of building an antifascist state in the gdr was not fulfilled. Rather he concluded in a letter to Marta Feuchtwanger after his flight 'anyone who has fought against Hitler is discriminated against from the outset -with a few exceptions. '83 In the same letter he voiced his regret about returning to Germany, 'I have often thought of the letter that [Lion] Feuchtwanger sent to me in New York . . . which begins with the words, "I hear with mixed feelings about your and Friedel's impending departure." I must not complain; I did not want it otherwise.'84 While in 1945 he had concluded that the 'other Germany is buried under the rubble' ,85 he now asserted that 'the other Germany in which we once believed in our exile was an illusion.'86 What is buried can be recovered, but now, Kantorowicz concluded the 'other Germany' had ever only existed in their antifascist imagination.
Kantorowicz was disillusioned; his hopes for the socialist Germany shattered. Yet West Germany, with its restorative tendencies and persistent antisemitism, appalled him, and he understood why others like Zweig might not wish to move to the Western part of the divided country: 'Not to say anything against the old people like Zweig or Renn' , he wrote to Marta Feuchtwanger, 'who can no longer be expected after all to take the risk of escape and start over in a furnished room, possibly at the discretion of Sudeten German Nazis and ultimate Endlöser, as I had to.'87 Others who fled the gdr, such as Leo Zuckermann, likewise struggled with making a life in the Western part of the country; when their dream of building an antifascist, socialist country shattered there was little to hold them in the 'country of perpetrators' .88 After leaving the gdr in 1953 and temporarily living in the West, Leo Zuckermann emigrated to Mexico -for the second time. 89 Conservative, anti-communist West Germany, reluctant to rid itself of former Nazis or to re-educate Germans, did not provide an attractive refuge for disenchanted antifascists from the East. Some of those who had returned to the West rather than the East likewise decided to leave Germany a second time. In his book, Farewell to Germany (1959), Heinrich Fraenkel, who just a few years earlier had voiced his belief in his home country's potential, described his disillusionment after his return: 'The title of this book is to be taken literally, for I do want Germany to fare well, I want it most sincerely. Hardly a surprising sentiment since Germany happens to be my homeland. I am still devoted to it, I am still anxious to get there for a visit once or twice a year, but I no longer wish to live there.'90 Fraenkel returned to London in 1949.
Like Kantorowicz, he came to the conclusion that his vision of the other Germany did not match reality. He, so he wrote, made 'the discovery that the "other Germany," in an exile's mind and his day-dreams of a future Germany were not quite alike to the reality of the post-war world.'91 From their vantage point in exile, Fraenkel concludes, they 'tended to over-simplify things . . . The human and material strands of the real pattern were interwoven in a manner far too complex to fit into the simple black and white pattern of an exile's dream-world.'92 Fraenkel explained that partially he struggled because he did not clearly choose a side in the conflict that began to dominate the world after the war: 'For a man these days to be neither an out-and-out fellow-traveller nor an out-and-out Red-baiter, is not quite easy . . . It is probably easiest in England, and that too may have been one of the reasons for my decision to make my home in England.'93 When the Cold War drew a new divide, people like Fraenkel who had clearly known on which side they stood when their world was split into fascists and antifascists, fell into an in-between space. Their hope of combining socialism and democracy did not find support in either West or East German postwar politics. 94 West Germany focused on memories of the conservative resistance and had no interest in embracing an inclusive antifascist tradition.95 While the gdr appropriated antifascism as its state doctrine, official antifascism differed from the dream of the Popular Front, and was neither as vague nor as inclusive. 90 Fraenkel Still, some Jews in the gdr, like Zweig, continued to hold onto their own perceptions and interpretations of antifascism. Antifascism remained more than a propaganda tool of the regime. 96 Even most of those whose hopes for founding or finding the 'other Germany' did not materialize, held on to their antifascism.97 In his writings after escaping the gdr, Kantorowicz drew a clear line between antifascism and Stalinism. Reflecting back after his flight he wrote, 'I will always keep the comrades at whose side I fought in the 1930s (and later in Spain and in the camps) against the Nazi terror in good memory.'98 In his memories antifascism remained a place of belonging.99

Conclusion
Leftist, exiled Jews' response to Nazi persecution was shaped by their universalist perspective. While they recognized the danger that Nazism posed for Jews early on, they understood the fight against Nazi antisemitism as part of a broader, antifascist fight. Most remained within a Marxist framework in their understanding, yet some ventured beyond economistic causes when trying to examine and analyze Nazi antisemitism, and views shifted in particular after information about the murder of European Jews reached them in their various places of exile. News of the Nazi genocide shaped theoretical discussions and also affected them personally. While the subjects of this article had left Germany, friends and relatives had remained behind. They publicly discussed the murder of European Jews as well as their personal loss. But there was not yet a word for the genocide that was taking place, and the tendency to perceive Jews' fate as merged with other victims of Nazism was commonplace. For antifascist Jews the fight against fascism was fought on behalf of all those oppressed, including (but often without emphasizing particular concern for) Jews.
They fought also on behalf of Germany, remaining part of a larger transnational but also specifically German antifascist collective.100 In contrast to most other Jews, they held onto the hope that a better Germany would be possible. An acknowledgement of popular antisemitism and support for Nazism would have, and eventually made believing in such dreams and plans for a future in their home country more difficult. Still, being part of this larger antifascist community motivated Jewish antifascists to return to Germany after 1945. While some, like Zuckermann and Kantorowicz, left the German Democratic Republic disillusioned, others like Zweig held onto their hopes, in spite of misgivings. Antifascism, in its vagueness and inclusivity, provided a non-territorial space of belonging. A translation of its ideals into shaping a society proved more difficult.