TOM KOVACH (UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA): I would like to take up from Susanne Klingenstein in questioning the reassertion of a German- Jewish symbiosis. Just for a humorous anecdote, I met Walter during the break after the morning session, and I said that I had been a little distressed about what I perceived of yesterday’s attempt to rehabilitate the notion of German-Jewish symbiosis, and I was so glad to hear that being problematized again this morning. And he said, oh well, you are going to hate my talk. I didn’t hate it, but I found it very inspiring and moving. But I do want indeed to question that — if this seems ungracious then at least you’re prepared. Two things that I would really like to raise. One is the biological origin of that metaphor and the other is its utopian content. I simply feel that to perpetuate anything, any biological discourse, in reference to the encounter between German and Jewish culture, mentalities, or whatever in light of the history of our century is just very, very troublesome. And I think that not to discredit what is wanted in the use of that phrase but just to discredit that metaphor, I think we would all do well to leave it behind us. And the other is precisely its utopian content; that is, I think we all agree on wanting to rescue something of the encounter between these two cultures and not to regard it as a one-way street leading to Auschwitz and that being its sole meaning, but yet to talk about the symbiosis, isn’t this so much a product of an earlier age in which one could think that the Nazis were an aberration, that this really never was going to happen, and if we want to rescue not only the heritage from Mendelssohn and Heine onward through 1933, but also (and others have alluded to this) the potentiality of a new and not all that tiny Jewish life in Germany today, shouldn’t we use a discourse that points in new directions and not try to revive that?

WALTER SOKEL: I would like to respond just very briefly. Talking in biological metaphors, just because the Nazis talked about it, I should desist from it because they did it?