It’s not always easy being a Jew in Berlin. Just being here, feeling the weight of history around me, takes a toll. It’s not the presence of the Holocaust memorials big and small all over the city and country, per se, or the fact that WWII footage is shown on TV history documentaries all the time. It’s just being here, where it all happened, hearing the language, seeing the faces and wondering — what did their parents do? What did their grandparents do? What would they do today, if a Hitler were rising to power?
It’s also the place names. It hit me one winter weekend when I was in the train station waiting for the local train, and a regional train to Dessau came through. Dessau–I didn’t know anything about the place at the time, but it just sounded like a place where something bad happened. Later, I researched the town’s history. Although there was no K.Z. (the German term for concentration camp) there, and while the town is best-known as the home of the Bauhaus college of architecture shut down by the Nazis, there was a factory in Dessau that produced Cyclon B, which was used to kill Jews and others in the Nazi gas chambers.
But it doesn’t even matter what actually happened there. The point is the subtle mental toll living here takes. There might be — probably is — more anti-semitism today in Spain. But if I were living in Madrid, and saw a train departing for Cordoba, I wouldn’t get a kind of queasy feeling (despite the Spanish Inquisition).
Indeed, there isn’t a lot of overt anti-Semitism here. I have seen a couple of graffiti swastikas on walls and buildings around Berlin over the last year, but not many. I’ve heard about the rising tide of neo-Nazism in certain parts of Germany, particularly the poor sections of the old East Germany, but at least in the liberal, mixed neighborhoods of Berlin I spend time in, it feels safe to be openly a Jew.
What I’ve heard from Jews here, in fact, is that the biggest threat to Jewish life in Germany and Europe today is not overt anti-Semitism, but a fading away of Jewish practice. This is due to secularization, due to the immigration of Russian Jews who don’t know anything about Judaism, and, above all, to intermarriage. In this way the challenge facing Judaism in Europe seems similar to, if more urgent than, in the United States.
… to be continued
