the idea of symbiosis was always suspect.

"Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied, and ridiculed Germans; only Jews seemed actually to have loved them. The links - and tensions - between Jews and Germans were sometimes described as stemming from an alleged family resemblance. Heine was one of the first to emphasize the similarities. He hailed Jews and Germans as Europe's two "ethical peoples"; together they would yet give birth to a new messianic age. Heine went so far as to claim that ancient Hebrews had been "the Germans of the Orient"! Goethe expressed a wish that Germans be dispersed throughout  the world as the Jews had been and strive like them for the improvement of mankind. (...) Walter Benjamin said in 1917: "The German and the Jew are like two related extremes that confront each other". Kafka maintained that Jews and Germans "have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thouroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs"

(...) Less positively, Jews and Germans stand accused of a similar combination of arrogance and self-loathing, tactlessness and hypersensivity. Even when such generalizations contain a grain of truth, they do ot explain the one-sided love or the one-sided hatred or what happened in the end.

At various times there has also been speculation - much of it rather tedious - as to whether there ever was a real "dialogue" between the two peoples or even, as some put it, a "symbiosis" - borrowed from, of all things biology - is even more dubious. In a symbiosis, one life-form is unable to exist without the other! Not surprisingly, symbiosis between humans was first preached by the Romantics as part of their organic notions of friendship, "race", biohistory, and civilization. Before the Holocaust, it was mostly Jews who spoke, hopefully, of symbiosis. Martin Buber rhapsodized about a German-Jewish symbiosis as late as 1939: it had been abruptly interrupted by the Nazis, he claimed, but it might be resumed again it the future. After the Holocaust, only penitent Germans evoked it, guilt-stricken and rueful over "their" loss. Altogether, the idea of symbiosis was always suspect. Why does nobody ever speak of an American-Jewish, french-Jewish, or Dutch-Jewish symbiosis?"

                            Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp.10-11