Travel Log #14

August 23, 2009

LBSU has come to an end, and so has my time in Germany. After ten hours of trains and buses, I have finally made it back to Luxembourg. Of course, this time around I find myself here under extremely different circumstances. I have no lofty-sounding position, nor do I have a place of my own. I am a visitor who does not speak French. My Americanness is made fun of--I am only fluent in one language. My love of words means nothing. My words are merely incomprehensible sounds, meaningless.

But on the train ride between Berlin and Frankfurt, I made friends with an East Berliner named Janine who is studying Jewish Studies and, for some reason unknown to me and under what I thought were strange circumstances, was transporting an Argentinian artist named Sergio to Manneheim. Sergio spoke neither English nor German. Janine asked me if I spoke any Spanish. I answered that I used to but am so out of practice that my "speaking Spanish" might as well be compared to my success in training as an astronaut. Yet, as fate would have it, Janine (no idea how to actually spell her name) and Sergio, despite the language barriers, ended up helping me a great deal and Janine begged me to try my Spanish so that we could both understand this very nice, mysterious artist from Buenos Aires. To my surprise, I remembered far more than I ever would have imagined, including verb conjugations in the preterite.

So: I learned that he is an artist on tour with his oil paintings (he had them all rolled up and the canvases were on the shelf above his seat). The tour was going through Germany and was ending in Saarbrucken. He has been in Germany for three weeks and was there three years ago. I also learned that he is a teacher of fine arts for students between the ages of ten and twenty.

When my stop was up, he helped me with my bags and we said goodbye. I luckily caught the bus, with twelve minutes to spare, to Frankfurt Hahn Airport and then the shuttle to Luxembourg. The phone card wouldn't work once I got to the Gare, so I ended up asking some cabbies how to get to Namir's place. Apparently it is too close to the station for them to bother trying to gouge me of money, so they pointed me two blocks down and to the right. "Five minutes walking. No problem," they said. I start walking with all my bags. I end up in front of some nightclub named "Byblos" with about ten mobster-looking gangsters straight out of The Sopranos, practically, who are all making eyes with the hooker across the street. I ignore this, figure it's Luxembourg, it can't be worse than Worcester, where I can pass as a prostitute at 2:00pm because I'm female. Baggage included, probably. I go up to one of the bouncers and tell him where I need to get to and if I can possibly use a phone.

The bouncers usher me inside with all of my things. I call Namir and he says he'll be there in five minutes. The bouncers laugh at me. Stupid American. Yes, I know. But: "You have a guitar, so it's ok". That was the bossman. Namir shows up on foot, thanks them for helping me and apologizes to them for my being American, which by now is synonymous with "only speak English". By the way, I understand far more French, etc. than I let on to any of these people. I'll keep that a secret.

For this log, I will bounce around in time. We are going backwards.

August 19, 2009

I have neglected these travel logs for the sake of my supposed studiousness. Today, I am 99% finished with my academic career, at least until I resume for graduate school. In any case, I have three pages left to write before the official end. They can hardly be considered academic. But where should I begin?

I will begin with this morning, when I stepped off the U8 at Weinmeisterstrasse and heard music through the Creedence I was blaring in my headphones. I turned the iPod off and walked up the stairs. There I found a street musician sitting on the floor, playing a guitar with the High E-string missing. The guitar had no pegs. He tuned it with a wrench. The strings were rusted out and were probably as old as the guitar--twenty, he said. "Zvansig." I donated change. I left him there smiling. He spoke broken English but sang it perfectly. His voice was very good and it followed me all the way up the stairs and halfway down the block.

"I'd give up everything to be like that. Poor, on the street, with only five rusty strings. But it's free and I'd have nothing left to lose," I thought. Part of me wonders why I kept walking, why I keep walking. Perhaps it is habit to have everything left to lose. Or maybe I am a coward and am afraid to push the boundaries through which music will break me. "I do this sometimes," I told him. "Sing on the street." "Can you live?" "No!" I laughed. "But I wish." "Aah," he answered. "A lot of us wish." And so we do. The acoustics are best in stairwells and subway stations, and bathrooms--three places where we are commonplace pariahs, where we are background noise, usually ignored, and almost always unapproachable. But the payment in sound is worth it. A lot of us wish.

The street was busy, as usual, but I was early again, so I walked down to the Backerei on Sophienstrasse. I have gone there almost every day for coffee and heavenly baked goods, from pastries to raisin bread. The owner, a wonderfully nice woman, encourages my German. I can order now, completely in German. She still doesn't understand any English. Tomorrow will be my last day to see her and I won't be able to say goodbye, just "danke" for my kaffee mit milch.

On my lunch breaks, I often go to another place around the corner for coffee or sandwiches. I made a friend there, Dustin. Speaks perfect American English bush wishes he still had a German accent. His goal is to move to the United States. His passion is German rap. He writes songs dedicated to his mother with names like Ich Liebe Dich. His arms are full of tattoos.

I am working backwards. I promised you Turks last time and I'm giving you musicians and bakeries. Turks will come up later but may have to be reserved for yet another one of these. I am working backwards, after all.

Presentations of our final projects began yesterday. I worked with Noam and Zuzanna. Zazi is from Poland. Noam, who I've mentioned before, is one of my best friends on this program. We decided to do our project on the "effectiveness" of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in the center of Berlin. It is is a one-minute walk from the Brandenburg Gate and about seven minutes from the Reichstag. The "effectiveness" is a controversial topic: effectiveness of what? What is the purpose or goal of a memorial in the first place? We decided to test the memorial's ability to inform viewers about the Shoah and its ability to evoke an emotional response in relation to the artwork's existence as a memorial and specifically, as a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe/Holocaust memorial. We hypothesized that there would be a direct correlation between the amount of knowledge viewers brought with them to the memorial and the level of emotion experienced. We learned that there is no correlation and that Americans are by far not the only clueless people in the world as is generally believed. Apparently, WWII ended in 1938 and 1953.

Our research involved a questionnaire, walking around the memorial site, and interviewing people about their basic knowledge of the Holocaust, National Socialism, and WWII. We also asked them about their emotional reactions/opinions/views/interpretations of the memorial, designed by Eisenmann of New York. We presented yesterday. The level of rest achieved last night is amazing compared to the rest of the summer.

On Sunday, we took another field trip. Ravensbruck Concentration Camp Memorial. One interesting thing about this camp, like almost every camp in Germany, is that most of its victims during the Nazi period were non-Jews; they were political opponents, many were from Eastern Europe, and they were mainly women. In the States, I never really learned about the non-Jewish victims of the Nazis. They're mentioned but just in passing, at best. Actually, they were numerous and made up the greater portion of victims within the borders of Germany. Eichmann decided to literally have all of Germany "judenfrei", so Jewish prisoners were shipped out beyond German borders, mainly to Eastern Europe. The remaining prisoners at Ravensbruck were active non-Jewish Nazi opponents and were forced to work as slave laborers for companies like Siemens until they either died or were liberated or shipped off to another camp.

I had never been to one of these camp memorials before and didn't know what to expect. In my head, I prepared myself for a depressing day of mourning. But when we got there, it seemed more like a beautiful summer lake resort (which is used to be) that I wanted to relax in for the rest of the summer. Quaint houses lined the shore, boats chugged along, beach grass and trees blew in the wind against a clear blue sky.

The houses were for the SS officers and their families. Yes, families. With children. About a ten minute walk away is the gas chamber. I only felt a horrific chill once, when I walked across the grounds and felt ghosts. The question recurred, the same one as at Wannsee: how could a place so beautiful be the site of so much blind hatred and destruction? Tens of thousands of people were murdered here. And I couldn't help but notice the lake and the trees and think "Oh, how beautiful, let's play frizbee". Most of us felt this way or similarly, I learned, after speaking with the others. What does that mean? What kind of monster am I?

We returned to Berlin and resumed class the next day. The memorial I carry on my spine gained more significance. In class, I was asleep. My class presentation on Monday went well, once it got started. The professor had to wake me up to get it started. Really. How sad is that? Actually, if I happen to not be sleeping in class, what keeps me entertained enough to stay awake is watching other people fall asleep. It's not that we're lazy, it's that we're studious. Seriously. We can do the reading and fall asleep in class, or not do the reading, get a good night's rest, and have nothing to say in class. I suppose it doesn't matter. Either way, most of us are useless in class.

In the afternoons, we have been meeting with leaders of the Jewish Community here (I have not been impressed), with the AJC (American Jewish Committee), and other NGOs like the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and some "Jewish artists". All of these meetings complemented the readings very well. The overall impression of Jews in Germany/Jews in Berlin, though, is more than complicated. There is, I feel, no concrete definition of what constitutes a "Jew" in general and/or what a "Jew" living in Germany is. Most of them are not descendants of pre-war German Jews and are caught between defining themselves as "Jews in Germany", "Jews living in Germany", "German Jews", or "Jewish Germans", or even "Russian-speaking Jews in Germany". Most are of the latter category, "Russian-speaking Jews in Germany". Many feel comfortable in Germany and do not want to leave, but are not very enthusiastic about calling themselves "German" despite the fact that many o them have or are in the process of getting German citizenship.

As I mentioned before, there is a huge problem over defining what a "Jew" is here and the typical intra-"community" rifts and fights. Examples: Should people not halachicly Jewish be allowed to join the Community or not? They are considered Jews by the larger society. The current Gemeinde (Community) excludes these people--at its own expense. The community is shrinking and alienating thousands of potential members. Another point: the "Community" in Germany, like in many other countries, and like all religious communities in this country, must be applied to. Member allocate 10% of their income tax to the government-funded religious "Community". This is how it works in many European countries, apparently. The Separation of Church and State is interpreted a bit differently than in the United States and to me, doesn't seem like a true separation. But that's my Americanness.

Most Jews in Germany opt to skip out on this tax and not become members. Or, they join as extremely poor immigrants who know they'll get benefits from the Communal funds. Once they're employed, they leave the Community and don't pay the tax. Considering the 80% Russian-speaking immigrant portion of Jews in Germany and the rather large rift between them and the pre-1989 population, I wouldn't want to join, either. And within the Jewish Community, where religious differences can mainly be ignored, the rift comes down to the usual human heirarchical struggle of class. The rich "do not associate with those factory workers". I believe I would be, as I am, comfortable in my non-membership and my secularism.

Travel Log #13

August 6, 2009
The important thing is to retain the conviction that every moment counts, every point of connection, every greeting and farewell--because without warning, like a flash of lightning, moments are gone. An explosion of angels on rooftops occurs around me after months of silence. Perhaps I am really breaking this time, or maybe the exhaustion results from my futile but unceasing push against the grain. Our conversation continues.


"Life is but a dream. Row your boat, right?" I say.
The angel tells me that I must cross the threshold of death in order to capture life. I tell him only gods can do that. 
The angel laughs. "What have you lost, Little Girl?"
"Almost everything, Uriel."
"Do you wish me to cover you?"
"No, angel. I am on my own. Let me bear it without illusions."
"As you wish."
"It will always be as it has always been, won't it?"
"Yes, Little Girl. As you know, the world is only as you perceive it."
"No. The world is as it is."


In the mornings, I sit down to enjoy my tea and my kefir, a German food very similar to yogurt but much tastier (in my opinion). At ten 'til nine, I walk downstairs and hope I run into some others on the way to the U-Bahn. That is on most days. On Monday, I did things differently because I needed to be alone. I am not a talented mourner, although I should be by now, and I hardly give myself a chance to grieve. These days, I don't know how to grieve anymore, because the tally of the dead keeps rising. But Bill Tapply was dead six days by Monday morning and no one can understand what that means unless they knew him and no one here did. There's also the complication of the past year or so. This grief is for multiple losses, losses by entertainment bullets at 5:00am, by ropes, by disease, by trains, by heart failure.

So, on Monday morning, I left early and bought a bagel and coffee for myself, sat down at a table on the inside of a window and watched the morning crowds of Mittel walk by. I knew some of them. They walked past. The window hid me. I was invisible. And then the hands of the clock moved forward, I finished my breakfast, told the cashier good day and walked down the street and around the corner to Sophienstrasse and waited for class to begin. This is how it has been: pretend that all is well. Merge with the apathetic, trivial crowds. Erase the individuality because that is all too often too painful to bear. Yet I live for only myself. I am a droplet incorporated into and separate from the sea of motion. As always, life goes on. I haven't written because life is busy. The second module of Leo Baeck has been quite different, in some ways more familiar (because it is literary rather than historical), and in some ways more demanding because of the amount of work. But the professors are nice and understanding, particularly after a group-wide mutiny over the elusive, esoteric nature of the "introductory" material. We have some brave people in this group (Matan) willing to voice student opinion straight into the instructors' faces. The rest of us followed. Results were good: reading was cut down, explanations of terms were offered, and people calmed down a bit. On the Sunday before Module II began, we were told to meet outside the flats at 8:00am, where we boarded a bus, met an offbeat ex-pat Canadian tour guide, and shoved off to Dresden with her for the day. As for the agenda, I didn't get much out of it. It was another long string of Holocaust memorials, including new ones like clear benches and plaques outside of train stations, calling attention to the German train line as equally responsible for the deportations--and the bench as a "statement" to combat neo-Nazi activity. The tour guide had a cow over the train station plaque because a bike was leaning on the wall under it. "Well, we know what kind of person this bike belongs to," she said and moved the bike two feet over to the overpopulated bike rack. My conviction is that the memorial is a bit inconspicuous--the "neo-Nazi" or at least "passive anti-Semite" probably didn't even notice it. I know I wouldn't have. And as for the bench, with its "For Aryans Only" sign, I wanted nothing more than to sit on it. But we weren't allowed. Then, we stood for forty-five minutes with the artist complaining about neo-Nazi activity in the area and her "feeling the need to do something to combat them". I walked off and took pictures. The bench, I think, would do nothing to "combat" but everything to provoke. I rather agree with the Dresden man who protested the bench's erection in the park among the other benches by the river because he had actually been banned from the park 65 years ago because he was a Jew--why should he be forced to confront "For Aryans Only" again? I agree. If Nazi symbols belong nowhere but in a museum or a classroom, why should a bench directly quoting Nazi sanctions against Jews be allowed to replace a normal bench in the middle of a park? Rather than memorializing, the bench reinstitutes the sanction. The fact that it was designed and built by a Jew does not excuse this reinstitution. It makes it all the more obscene. Particularly because this Jewish artist is proud of it and thinks of it as "combating Nazi sentiments". There is a fine line between commemoration, remembering, and recreating history in the present. Especially in Germany.

The new synagogue in Dresden is beautiful but closed off, inaccessible, and dead. In Dresden, it is a symbol of hope for the Jewish community but it is a monument and not a place of life. People are either too assimilationist to join or too bored with it and opt for Chabad instead. I've heard a similar story. I am one. For the last two-and-a-half hours, we went off on our own--sans the tour guides. Beer and ice-cream were in order. I went off with Rachel, Florian, Carrie, and Kalani to the other side of the river, away from the bombed-out, rebuilt churches and houses, away from August the Strong, and away from statues of Martin Luther and from Johann, at whom we would have to meet later.

We complained about what I discussed earlier with the memorials. I watched children play around us and other talking and juggling. Dresden is a beautiful city that has been completely rebuilt to look as it was at its height during the Saxony reign of August the Strong during the 19th century. At the end, we went back to Berlin. On the road between Dresden and Berlin, there are fields of sunflowers stretching towards the sky. There are fields of windmills drawing on natural power. I wonder why my own country lags so far behind in the progressive movement for clean energy. I turn on my music loud to block out extraneous conversation and I clear my head to reminisce. Words come, inspiration, a deus ex machina--history has been suffocating me. I exhale it.

"The interesting thing about how Holocaust memory has been constructed," says the professor, "is that we focus on the big names like Auschwitz and Dachau. These are the names that resonate with us, the places that evoke the most powerful images of destruction and death. But let us ask ourselves this question: Why? Why do we remember these particular camps? Precisely because these were not the worst-case scenarios. We hear about these camps the most because they had the most survivors. There is a tale to be told. Others weren't so lucky. The other stories are lost in the camps we hardly remember, because in those, there were no survivors. Think about it."

I think about it and then I stop. I can't think about things like this for too long without draining myself of life. Forgetting is something I cannot do, but memories like these--postmemories--are there as reminders. Preventative medicine. Life must go on. And it does. I have been to shul twice. This is allowed. No one gives me funny looks. Miracles happen every day. The Jewish population in Germany has reached its pre-war levels. Yes, most of them are foreigners--Russian, Polish, Israeli, etc, but Jewish. Hitler did not win. Still, National Socialist ideals and anti-Semitism are alive in a repressive manner within the national consciousness. The repressed sentiments, or rather the taboo against talking about history, creates a paranoia and a guilt. This is the paranoia to which I have referred multiple times. It is very apparent in Berlin; it bulges against the thin film of celebration and rebirth and newness that is this city. But, as Zafer Senocak says (who I have had the good fortune of meeting and speaking with): Berlin is a city where "what is new grows old faster than elsewhere"; there can "be no better place to be young".

On the surface, Berlin seems to me a city like any other: busy, "cosmopolitan", vivacious. Yet, there's always, inescapably, the weight of this city's history and with that history, the guilt, and with that guilt, the paranoia. This city is a work in progress, forever under construction, decorated with scaffolding. New bricks replace the old, but they grow old quickly, too. New architecture brings Berlin into the post-Wall twenty-first century from an imaginary post-history/post-apocalyptic era. New immigrants from everywhere, mainly the East--Turkey, the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East--flood the city, merge their cultures with the native inadvertently and explicitly. Begrudgingly. There is the usual tug-of-war between assimilation and isolation. Berlin is a mongrel city despite the war. It is a city filled with ifrits, leprechauns, and golems all bunking together under the same bridges. None of the bridges burn, but the buildings they connect across water are razed for fear of a polluted past.

And alongside all of this, Holocaust memorials and Jewish spaces spring up like weeds on Miracle Grow; Jewish spaces without a Jewish presence. The Jews are elsewhere in certain areas and at certain times. I wonder: when will history become an acceptance, a lesson in this city and not an oppressive and repressed aversion? Our vision of the present is so obscured by the past here that I struggle to find a piece of this place--just one piece--that is itself, present, neither looking back nor forward, but proud and unguilty, responsible, for its own moment in time. But everywhere I look there's a new memorial and a vision of something absent. Or a suggestion of a void. No one explains what that absence is these days. Perhaps the full extent of it is unknown. It is more than the descendants of the Shoah and the war. The absence makes the present in this city just as much a myth as the past because we are forbidden from living in and celebrating the moment beyond the borders of dreams.

We are the living and we, too, deserve life. Martyrdom will bring no one and nothing back. We are the descendants of survivors--of all parties. We should live as what we are: a celebration of the continuation of life and of the (hopefully) enlightened and more humane generation. Yet the past is bestowed upon us as an inheritance we cannot decline. Because of this, I propose that today, the tragedy of genocide is not merely just the destruction, but rather the continuation and perpetuation of memory amongst those who survived and pass along such burdensome histories to us, their children.

Yet every generation bears its burdens. What I have found is a focus on one point of memory, and on one specific history. Specific histories are, no doubt, important, but individual histories must be placed (and taught) in context. Here, I feel that they are not, which is why we get questions regarding how Jews developed a certain way in Germany or elsewhere. The problem is that we only say "they assimilated" and discuss the theory of assimilation without looking at the (just slightly) important element of what Jews are assimilating into, aka German society. And we go on about the "German-Jewish symbiosis" but neglect to talk about German society and German history. History classes like to pretend that German society began in 1933 with the rise of National Socialism and ended in 1945 with its fall. Lo and behold! there is a whole history before that--where Germany was more tolerant and accepting of Jews than anywhere else on earth (including the United States). And there is post-War, occupied, and partitioned Germany; and now, post-Wall Germany--and all the while we invoke historical notions without defining our terms and or even looking at those moments of history directly. Instead, we zero in on Holocaust memorials. Memorials are nice, and sometimes necessary, but after a while they all become the same and begin to lose their meaning.

A memorial is a fine thing and it is a necessity that the past be commemorated. But when it comes down to the past as stone for a tally of deaths and the present as absence for just one missing life that I actually knew—six now—my grief gravitates and expands and pools for the present absence and not for the tally of deaths represented by a stone. And yes, there is another present absence, too, and I grieve for it as well. It is the absence of all the descendants of those tallied by the stone, and as I said before, five years ago: that place where the air blows freely could have been me. But I am lucky, some survive. Thus I am here, and I bear no survivor’s guilt. But a stone is just a stone and bench is just a bench and after a while, so-called memorials lose their meaning when you see them one after another. I am not desensitized—not to individuals—but to numbers invoked over and over again? We are no better than those who transformed names to numbers and who consigned numbers to death and a statistic, and who categorized people by race or religion or otherwise.

So, here, I can blow history wide open and remind us that there is a present to be lived, that guilt is not healthy, and neither is living in the past. We all owe death a life, after all. At least let us make it worth while. And so, I make friends with Germans who feel no guilt because they weren’t there, they killed no one. Rather, they feel a responsibility to educate themselves so that it won’t happen again—to anyone. But even as I write and as we speak, I know that history teaches no lessons. The same thing is happening right now all over the world and the paranoia is growing, and thus is the practice of ignoring the truth and the labeling of hate with a different name.