Germany is now known as the site of the most horrific anti-Semitic slaughter in history, the Holocaust. But well before Hitler's rise, as Michael Brenner shows in his new book, In Hitler's Munich, there was a long history of Jewish communal life in Germany, as well as a long history of anti-Semitism. There was even a Jewish premier of Bavaria in the years after World War I, the journalist and revolutionary Kurt Eisner. Eisner was assassinated by an anti-Semite, Count Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Arco-Valley, as he is more commonly known, had Jewish ancestry—a reminder of the complicated nature of German-Jewish relationships even before the rise of Nazism.
