Home After Fascism: Italian and German Jews After the Holocaust

This talk is based on Koch’s recent book Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust. Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights how three distinct national contexts—East Germany, West Germany, and Italy—shaped their answers to the question, is this home?

Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at home in the "country of murderers." Yet, some retained a sense of belonging through German culture and language or felt attached to a specific region or city. Still others looked to the future; socialist and communists of Jewish origin hoped to build a better Germany in the Soviet Occupied Zone. In all three postwar states, surviving Jews fought against persistent antisemitism, faced the challenge of recovering lost homes and possessions, struggled to make sense of their persecution, and tried to find ways to reclaim a sense of belonging.


Anna Koch is the Francis L. Carsten DAAD lecturer at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European History. She previously taught European and Jewish history at the Universities of Southampton and Leeds and has held fellowships at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, the German Historical Institute in Rome, and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. Her book Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust was published by Indiana University Press in 2023, and her co-edited volume (together with Stephan Stach) on Holocaust Memory and the Cold War is forthcoming with deGruyter in October 2024.