Preface by John Grenville and Raphael Gross

The contributions in the 2004 edition of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book reflect the deep interest and changing perspectives contemporary scholars bring to the past of German-speaking Jewry, including the very recent past.

The lead article, Andreas Kossert's Endlösung on the 'Amber Shore', is a graphic account, based on documents in the Soviet Archives, showing how even as the war was lost and the Red Army was overrunning East Prussia, SS fanaticism and brutality did not lessen. In this period, the SS perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews to occur in East Prussia. However, the importance of this contribution does not only lie in the reconstruction of a largely neglected late-Second World War Nazi massacre; it also demonstrates how selective historical memory can be. The largely successful evacuation of German refugees by the German navy is a well-known episode, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine with the loss of 5,000 lives having been the subject of books and films. The fate of the Jews in this region, however, was a repressed chapter in German history.

There is a link between Andreas Kossert's article and that of Christian Wiese on the ambivalent relationship between Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem as they tried to grapple with the Nazi years and the Holocaust. Their Zionist commitment, the ethical challenges of their time, attitudes to Jewish integration in Germany and their disillusionment with the integration process, as well as their commitment to Jewish religious history, are some of the important topics Wiese addresses in his documentary account. Their correspondence and Christian Wiese's interpretation throw new light on two eminent German-Jewish intellectuals.

As Jörg Hackeschmidt indicates, Norbert Elias is generally recognised as 'one of the most important cultural and social theories of the twentieth century'; scholars have examined his work from many perspectives. What is new in Hackeschmidt's essay is its examination of Elias's close connection with the early history of German Zionism-more particularly, his intense activity within the Blau-Weiß Zionist youth organisation, which Elias joined in 1913.

In Hamburg in the first decades of the last century, Aby Warburg was developing what now is commonly referred to as cultural history or interdisciplinary cultural studies. With the financial help of his banker brothers he established the celebrated and unique Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. As Dorothea McEwan reminds us in her article, it was Fritz Saxl-'Acting Director' of the library when Warburg was absent from 1920 to 1924, and the far more practical of the two figures-who "shaped the work in the library and moved it in a direction extending beyond its status as a collection of books and photographs purchased by its owner". Belatedly, McEwan's discussion does justice to Fritz Saxl's essential contribution to a seminal cultural enterprise.

In his article on Sigmund Freud, Robert Wistrich considers the nature of a sense of identification with Judaism maintained by the founder of psychoanalysis despite his view of religious rituals as empty and meaningless. In Freud's self analysis, we are reminded, he attributes such antipathy to a 'father-complex'. Robert Wistrich also provides us with an account of Freud's equivocal feelings towards the Jews from Eastern Europe living in Germany, his bitter reaction to the antisemitism he encountered, and his sense, tied to this, that the Jewish effort to assimilate into general German society was ultimately futile.

The six articles on Jewish remigration and concluding comment published in this Year Book have their origin in a June 2004 conference at the University of Haifa on 'Migration and Remigration: Jews in Germany after 1945', which the LBI London organised jointly with the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa in June 2004. We thank its director, Yfaat Weiss, for helping us with publishing the conference papers as well as the DIE ZEIT Foundation for their generous financial support.

In this section's opening article, Marita Krauss offers an overview of the history of the approximately 30,000 Jews who returned to Germany after the Holocaust: who were the returnees and why did they return? Both in West Germany and in Israel, remigration was perceived as a highly symbolical phenomenon; its political implications are examined in Meron Mendel's essay, while that of Tobias Winstel centres on the interaction of the material and non-material dimensions of the process of West Germany's Wiedergutmachung, its coming to terms with both the past in general and the specific reality of remigration.

Three additional articles add an intellectual-historical dimension to the political, economic and social issues discussed in this part of the Year Book. Arnd Bauerkämper considers the question of how three eminent scholars, Hans Rothfels, Ernst Fraenkel and Hans Rosenberg, transferred political values from their experience of exile in Western democracies to postwar Germany. Lars Rensmann compares the different ways in which Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt came to terms in their lives and writings with their experiences in Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s. As Gabriel Motzkin observes in his comment on the articles in this section, returned emigrants are never greeted with open arms.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and in his contribution Nicolas Berg considers one of them: the conservative German historian Hans Rothfels. From a Jewish background in Wilhelminian Germany but himself a convert to Protestantism at the age of nineteen, Rothfels was embraced by non-Jewish German historians and this, Berg argues, played an important role in transforming Germany's "general apologetic reflexes" after 1945 into "an academic discipline". This article thus addresses key issues present in an ongoing, heated debate on postwar and contemporary German historiography, and on the general relation of postwar German intellectual life to the Nazi past.

In the final article of this Year Book, Moshe Pelli brings us back to the period of the first Jewish "enlightened ones"-the maskilim-in Germany. As Pelli shows, the early nineteenth century dispute among the maskilim whether the goals of the Jewish Enlightenment could best be served by continuing to publish works in pure German, or whether Yiddish should rather be used to reach the Jewish masses, was encapsulated in one particular work by Tuvyah Feder: a "dialogue of the dead" defending the use of German while attacking another maskil, Mendel Lefin, for his embrace of Yiddish.

One of the most valued features of the Year Book is the annual bibliography expertly compiled by Barbara Suchy and Annette Pringle. With interest in German-Jewish history continuing to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to compile a bibliography that remains within reasonable bounds. We are thus particularly fortunate in being able to rely on the good judgement of our two bibliographers of long experience. The bibliography has become an indispensable tool for scholars and we are grateful to the Friends of Bat Hanadiv Foundation, the Sheldon and Suzanne Nash Fund, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung for funding its publication.

This Year Book includes a new feature: a section devoted to abstracts of doctoral theses related to German-Jewish history. We hope this will prove to be a useful tool for research. All abstracts of foreign-language theses will be translated into English, and we will incorporate information concerning archival material used in the thesis whenever possible.

Our annual thanks to the Bundesministerium des Innern and the Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder der Bundesrepublik Deutschland should not be read as routine. Through the decades, their support-which has remained unwavering in years of austerity-has been something of which all those who value the work of the Leo Baeck Institute are gratefully aware.

A publication whose submitted articles are not always in English makes particularly heavy demands on its editorial staff. In addition, Joel Golb and Gabriele Rahaman, our manuscript editors, are committed to presenting our authors with challenging queries and suggestions aimed at clarifying and shaping an argument's underlying meaning. Although their own intellectual input is not directly apparent in our contributions, as editors it gives us pleasure to receive many appreciative thanks in this respect from our contributors. Once again we especially thank our Advisory Board members, together with numerous external referees, for reading and commenting on submitted manuscripts. Their input is essential, and their willingness to devote time to assessing manuscripts enhances the academic standing of the Year Book.

Our publishers, Berghahn Books, have once again proceeded in a very timely manner to produce an unusually complex volume, with its articles, bibliography and indexes. We wish to thank them for this-and for carrying out this work with an efficiency blended with good humour.