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.