No previous Congress had met in a period so sharply distinguished from the preceding one. The 12th Zionist Congress was the first Congress after World War I. It was held in Carlsbad on Sept. 1–14, 1921, after the following crucial events had taken place: the Balfour Declaration, the British conquest of Palestine, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, mass pogroms against Ukrainian Jews, and the London Zionist Conference (1920), at which the Keren Hayesod was founded. During this period the Zionist movement in America had begun to come to the fore, and the Brandeis group had clashed with Weizmann's leadership at the London Conference. The Zionist leadership had also been transformed. The "Berlin period" had come to an end with the defeat of Germany in World War I, and the group that had obtained the Balfour Declaration, led by Weizmann and Sokolow, had transferred the Zionist world center to England. At the London Conference, Weizmann was elected president of the Zionist Organization and Sokolow president of the Executive. In addition, the first years after the Balfour Declaration had been marked by anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem (1920) and Jaffa (1921). Weizmann delivered a report on the political activities of the Zionist Organization during the war and called on the Jewish people to assist in building Erez Israel. Ruppin brought the acquisition of large tracts of land in the Jezreel Valley before the Congress for approval and was opposed by the directorate of the JNF, led by Nehemiah de Lieme. Bialik, among others, came out in defense of the Jewish workers in Palestine who were the subject of attacks by the "efficiency"-minded group, opposing Weizmann's leadership. For the first time in the history of Zionism, a representative of the workers in Erez Israel, Josef Sprinzak, was elected to the Executive, which thereafter was situated in London and Jerusalem.

Max Kollenscher, a Poznan lawyer, was an articulate Zionist who sat on the German Zionist Central Committee. Born in 1875, Kollenscher was the son of a wealthy Poznan grain merchant who was nominally Orthodox, but completely Germanized. He studied law at the University of Breslau and although he successfully passed the state legal examinations, realized that as a Jew he would not be able to pursue a career in the Prussian judicial service. According he decided to return to Poznan, where he set up in private practice as a lawyer. A liberal and integrationist, he believed that the establishment of a fully democratic system was more important than any specific Jewish issues and at this time supported the Progressive party, regarding the ‘Jewish question’ as purely a ‘confessional matter.’

The worsening situation of the Jews in Europe and particularly in Germany led him to nationalist Jewish politics. As he put it, ‘people in Posen had always felt that in some way or another the Jews formed a third nationality.’ Painful as it was, he felt that one had to acknowledge, ‘We are not Germans, we are Jews.’ He conceded that a break with German culture would be painful for him, but, in his words, he was ‘bound by iron chains’ to his Jewishness (Judentum und Judenheit), which he felt ‘not as a burden but as a necessary part of my self and my identity.’ His personal relations and friendships had always been exclusively Jewish, something he saw as ‘natural’. In particular, he expressed his pride at the exceptional solidarity and sense of community of the Jewish community in Poznania. He was fortunate to live in so strongly rooted a community.

Like many early German Zionists, Kollenscher saw no contradiction between his Zionist beliefs and his German civic patriotism. According to him, ‘we do not repudiate German patriotism. Nationality has nothing in common with patriotism.’ What was impossible for Jews was to be accepted into the German nation (Deutschtum). German Zionists would, however, remain German culturally. The German language and culture ‘have become our most secure and solid possessions, which we wish never to relinquish.’

German Zionists could therefore feel a German patriotism. ‘Patriotism, however, fixes itself upon the state, and the state is not the exclusive possession of one nation alone.’ the German Zionists could thus be both patriotic German citizens and the architects and pioneers of a future Jewish state in Palestine which would in no way threaten the interests of the German Empire..’

Kollenscher felt that commitment to a Jewish state in Palestine would release Jewish creativity, stifled by the impossibility of becoming fully German. If the Jew, he wrote, ‘can labor in the life of other nations only under external limitations and with inner difficulty, because political and social barriers, disgrace, envy, and hatred hold him down, as a Jew and Zionist a free and unlimited field for work and creativity opens to him.’

In the conflict over whether Zionism involved a commitment to settle in Palestine, which came to a head at the Zionist Union Congress of 1912, Kollenscher sided with the old guard, who rejected the argument that every Zionist had to include in his ‘life’s plan’ some time spent in Erets Yisrael. Poznanian Zionists concentrated their principal efforts on trying to transform their own community. They were enthusiastic supporters of a ‘Jewish renaissance, ’ to be fostered by the study of modern Hebrew and Jewish history. In their polemics they attacked ‘servile’ assimilation and conversion and called for the return to synagogue services of ‘Zionist’ prayers, which the Reform movement had excised.

They also attempted to gain a foothold on Jewish communal councils under the slogan ‘Democracy against the notables. ’ Yet although they had some successes in 1903 in Poznan, the common front of Orthodox and Liberals barred their subsequent progress. This did not prevent Kollenscher and his associates from setting out a large-range scheme for using the communal councils to create a system of Jewish communal autonomy of the sort advocated by Shimon Dubnow. In this way, they hope to ‘nationalize the Jewish people (Volk)’ in Germany. They did make some progress. In the Poznan communal elections of 1914 Zionist candidates polled nearly three hundred votes as against the Liberal Orthodox candidates nine hundred. This was a significant change and the strength of the Zionists was still greater among younger people.

The Zionists certainly became a presence in the Jewish life of Prussian Poland in the decade before the outbreak of the war. At provincial Zionist conferences and at the Reich Congress of 1912 which took place in Poznan, they bitterly attacked Polish and German antisemitism and the Prussian government’s policy in the area. At their local meetings, they were alone among Jewish organizations in the province in condemning the antisemitic demogogy of the Bund der Landwirte.