Stranger in My Own Country: a Jewish Family in Modern Germany

A moving and unsettling exploration of a young man?s formative years in a country still struggling with its past

As a Jew in postwar Germany, Yascha Mounk felt like a foreigner in his own country. When he mentioned that he is Jewish, some made anti-Semitic jokes or talked about the superiority of the Aryan race. Others, sincerely hoping to atone for the country?s past, fawned over him with a forced friendliness he found just as alienating.
     Vivid and fascinating, Stranger in My Own Country traces the contours of Jewish life in a country still struggling with the legacy of the Third Reich and portrays those who, inevitably, continue to live in its shadow. Marshaling an extraordinary range of material into a lively narrative, Mounk surveys his countrymen?s responses to ?the Jewish question.? Examining history, the story of his family, and his own childhood, he shows that anti-Semitism and far-right extremism have long coexisted with self-conscious philo-Semitism in postwar Germany.
     But of late a new kind of resentment against Jews has come out in the open. Unnoticed by much of the outside world, the desire for a ?finish line? that would spell a definitive end to the country?s obsession with the past is feeding an emphasis on German victimhood. Mounk shows how, from the government?s pursuit of a less ?apologetic? foreign policy to the way the country?s idea of the Volk makes life difficult for its immigrant communities, a troubled nationalism is shaping Germany?s future.