Yascha Mounk was born in Germany in a culturally Jewish family originary from Poland. The official Polish antisemitism within the Communist Party at the end of the 1950s, forced his family to leave Poland and spread all over the world. Belonging to a post-war generation born Jewish but raised Communist and Polish, his family set in Germany, besides the heavy weight of the recent past, because they wanted a professional future. As many immigrants in Germany, they learned the language and contributed to the larger German society.
Yascha Mounk was born here, speaks German with an accent and is vaguely - if ever - involved in the institutional Jewish life. From the legal point of view, Germany is indeed his country, but a country where he does not feel at home and never did. Nowadays an American citizen, he lives and teaches political sciences in New York City.
Stranger in my Own Country belongs to a recent trend of memoirs written by young Jews living in Germany who are brutally coming at terms with their identity, which can also mean rejecting dramatically the society that never wanted them.
There are a couple of aspects involved by this process.
On one side, is the nauseating philosemitism which is as pathetic as lacking any substance. It´s a mental automatism, a tic, which in fact does not say anything - good - about how the Germans really feel officially about Jews. Usually expressed in the presence of someone declaring his or her Jewish identity, this attitude does not mean anything but a political statement, empty of a practical meaning. It is just a reflex, not a constant state of mind, and its clearer reflection is the attitude towards refugees. ´In fact, while ordinary Germans now have a multifaceted contradictory attitude towards Jews, many of them express hostility against other kinds of immigrants and foreigners with larger integration issue´.
On the other side, there is the frontal antisemitism which never actually left - Europe, or Germany and what was latest heard on the streets of Berlin, London or Milan, to name only a few is one of the many proofs in this respect.
Caught between those extreme attitude, Mounk, as many other Jews living here, born or only immigrants, could not feel at home. Do not have any real reason to consider Germany their home. The wall between they and them and the others and in the end, between humans as such, are becoming higher and higher. A self protection against each other.
The book explains the post-WWII German history - from the West Germany perspective - through facts and historical details. The slow development of the Jewish communities in Germany are explained in the same time with the different incidents and the shift in the field of the mentalities, particularly acknowledging the past in all its complexity and especially context. ´A younger generation of intellectuals, in short, has become willing to talk about the German victims of WWII without feeling the need to put their ancestors´ suffering into context´. A kind of YOLO interpretation of history which irony put aside, is wrong in its simplicity.
Stranger in my own country is the unhappy ending for an identity search. Actually an identity which is refused for all the wrong reasons. But we are living in a fluid world and identities can be replaced, embelished and re-created. I am glad that in the last ten years so many memoirs written by young German Jews were written. Although the tone is sad and disappointed, those testimonies can create a space for open discussion and, who knows, maybe a medium- and long-term change at the level of mentalities.
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