Citation:
Abstract:
Issue 3/2019: Israel, Palestine and German Contemporary History; ed. by Evelyn Runge and Annette Vowinckel. Geographically and culturally the Middle East seems to be far away from Germany. From a historical point of view, this is a fallacy, because the virulent conflicts there today are closely interwoven with German and European colonial history, the history of National Socialism and German post-war history. The Middle East conflict is also present in many ways in contemporary German everyday life: while the media repeatedly report on anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist attacks, the restaurant »Kanaan« in Prenzlauer Berg, jointly run by a Jewish and an Arab Israeli, serves »Hummus for International Understanding«. Berlin and Jerusalem are connected on a completely different level by the presence of walls in the cityscape: from 1948 to 1967 Jerusalem was a divided city, Berlin from 1961 to 1989, since 2002 a wall separates parts of East Jerusalem from the Palestinian autonomous territories.Some of the contributions in this issue are devoted to the various effects of the Middle East conflict on German society, such as the presence of Palestinian and Israeli groups in the Federal Republic. Others focus on German-Israeli phenomena such as the reception of Ephraim Kishon's books or the Federal Republic's arms exports to Israel in the 1970s. The aim is to document and discuss how closely German contemporary history is linked to that of Israel and Palestine to this day.