This book addresses the great hope for equality, citizenship, and a life of partnership that had uplifted German Jews during the Era of Emancipation. It treats the various factors that caused the shattering of this hope. It also treats the Jews' extraordinary achievements – sometimes indeed against all odds – during that period. It is the story of success on the brink of destruction. However, I do not intend to tell it in full nor in a perfect chronological order. My purpose is to dwell upon some of the questions this story has raised for me, from my own, personal point of view. Yet this is not a private matter. My personal perspective is, in a sense, the perspective of an entire generation, a generation of Jews, in particular Israeli Jews, who seem to be still contemplating the strange life-experiences of their parents and grandparents, sometimes even their great grandparents, in Germany before Nazism. Mine, I believe, is likewise the perspective of a generation of historians, endeavoring to rethink what has traditionally been presented to them as a closed, reasoned, and sealed story. The questions I pose reflect my place in the generational chain of German Jewry as well as my position in the historiographical chain of writing about them. They also reflect, as always, the uneasy times in which we live.