MICHAEL WOLFFSOHN favors army service by young German Jews, and teaches at Bundeswehr University, the national military academy. But his own military experience wasn't gained in German uniform. Beginning in 1967, Wolffsohn spent what he calls "three very long years in the Israeli army."
That didn't keep the historian, one of the most interesting Jewish intellectuals in reunified Germany, from giving up his Israeli citizenship in the early 80s. And in a community of people who still mostly prefer to call themselves "Jews in Germany" because "German Jews" makes them uncomfortable, Wolffsohn has adopted the controversial label of "German-Jewish patriot."
"A patriot," he told The Jerusalem Report, "is a person who identifies with the state in which he or she lives. Without claiming it is paradise on earth, this is a free and democratic country, working relatively well." That in no way means denying the past, but Wolffsohn doesn't want to deny the present either, with what he sees as the chance for normal life: "I call myself a German-Jewish patriot, knowing Jewish-German and German history, knowing very well what the Holocaust was, but also knowing this is the first truly free political system in Germany."
Such views, and his choice of where to teach, have made Wolffsohn highly controversial among German Jews. So have his dovish opinions on Israeli policy. Yet his book, "Eternal Guilt: Forty Years of German-Jewish-Israeli Relations," also made him a leading and respected commentator on those complex and sometimes macabre interactions.
Wolffsohn was born in Palestine in 1947; both sets of his grandparents had escaped from Germany in 1939. The German military is part of family history: His mother's father had earned an Iron Cross for his service in World War I. In 1954, his parents left Israel for West Berlin. But after he completed his BA in economics, he chose to return to Israel to serve in the army. It was a temporary stay - he went back to Germany, earned his doctorate, and made his choice of identity clearer by his decision to give up dual citizenship.
"I came back to Germany on purpose," he recalls. "As long as one lives in one country, it is dishonest to pretend to be an Israeli." The question, he indicates, is not his alone: "Any Jew who takes his Jewish background seriously has to make up his mind and either nurture that identity in the voluntary Diaspora or go to Israel." Wolffsohn has made his choice: Germany.