Not Yet A Berliner, But Not So Far Away, Either

There is a story that when John F. Kennedy pronounced ''Ich bin ein Berliner!" at the Berlin Wall in 1963, instead of expressing his (and America's) solidarity with West Germany, he inadvertently thundered "I am a jelly donut!", Berliner being a German, jelly-filled pastry. If true, then speaking on our behalf, Kennedy was assuring Germany that all America stood behind a jelly donut.

It turns out that the story is only partially true -- that, technically he could have been declaring his (and our) oneness with jelly donuts, but the only way a German could possibly have reached that interpretation, Kennedy would have had to make the claim standing in a bake shop, to which his German audience would have responded, "Nein, Sind sie verrückt" ("No, you are nuts.").

Given the actual context, addressing a huge Berlin crowd in the open, what he said was not that he was a jelly donut, but that he was a citizen of Berlin. Germans remember him fondly for it.

I don't know that I will ever say "Ich bin ein Berliner" in either sense, but I can say that my time here in the German capitol has greatly changed my perception of this city and what fills it. How representative it is of Germany as a whole I don't know, but my initial concerns about being Jewish and coming to the one-time epicenter of anti-Semitism have been greatly allayed. Berlin is contrite about its Final Solution past. Politicians talk openly about it; citizens talk knowledgeably about it; the city is flecked with museums and cemeteries and memorials recounting a significant German-Jewish heritage as well as an ignoble German-Jewish past.

Non-Jewish Germans seem to feel something more than simple penance. It is almost as though they have embraced a terrible past, and with it, a truer sense of themselves, not who they were -- though that is surely part of it -- but also, who they are, truly, and want to be: what Germans, and Germany believe and represent. By opening themselves to self-scrutiny, they also confront visitors with the admonition to do the same.

Last night, at the farewell party for the Berlin Fulbright Conference, a woman complemented me on my hat (it's a good hat) and we began talking. She, Irene, is no jelly donut, but a true Berliner. She holds several degrees and has spent years in the U.S., China, Russia, and her own Germany earning them. Her PhD is in Sino-Russia history.
 
Yet, it wasn't her knowledge of a once-upon-a-time communist relationship that impressed me as we spoke but rather her knowledge of German-Jewish relations, then and now. Irene is not a Jew, though if admission to Judaism were a matter of respect and appreciation for its religious culture, Irene could be bat mitzvahd

I had to check out of my hotel the next day (today) by noon, but Irene offered to take me on a Jewish tour beforehand. 

* * *

We met this morning at 9:00 on the Senefelder Platz subway platform, two stops from the hotel. Within a short walk of the station she brought me to the Jewish cemetery on Schöenhauser Allee, the only one of the two cemeteries she would show me not desecrated by the Gestapo. A little museum, called a lapidarium, held a display of tombstones, its walls bearing information about the traditional format for a Jewish tombstone, some of the symbols that adorn them (a butterfly, water pitcher, Star of David, for example), as well as other historical and religious explanations. Unfortunately for Irene, and surprising to her -- because so many who visit these Berlin sites are English-only Americans --, all the information was in German, and so she had to translate it all for this English-only American. (That earned her lunch later on, a cheeseburger, though she certainly could have demanded higher. Owing to the dollar's puniness against the Euro, I was relieved.)

She then walked me out to the actual cemetery, crowded with listing and fallen tombstones from 100, 200 years ago. Some black, some brown, some grey. Most with Hebrew chiseled into one side and German chiseled into the other. Trees shot past the tombstones. A bed of ivy kept them all warm. It was green and pretty, but a bit unruly, as old cemeteries, and the codgers who come to occupy them, sometimes get.

Irene then walked me to the Mitte, the "center," Berlin's prewar district of Jewish living and culture. She showed me the other cemetery at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, unrecognizable as such but for the single tombstone of Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th century philosopher. The cemetery had functioned as a burial ground from 1672 to 1827, but in 1943 the Nazis removed the tombstones so that they could have a lawn upon which to play ball. I didn't think to ask Irene if the Nazis spared Mendelssohn, or if his tombstone was only replaced after the war.

She then showed me the spot adjacent to that cemetery where once stood a building which served for many years as a Jewish hospital and nursing home, and not briefly enough as a Gestapo processing center for Jewish deportation. It was destroyed in a Berlin bombing raid; only its space remains. 

Several blocks away she showed me an orphanage, named Ahawah, Hebrew for "love," that was similarly converted to the orderly extermination of Berlin's Jews. A plaque tells its history as an orphanage, as well as an announcement of its renovation and reopening. The plaque dates from 1998. Nothing has been done to the building, and it is deteriorating badly.

 

Less imposing than the cemeteries and memorial sites, but more arresting, are the "stumbling blocks" that Irene had told me about the night before. More figurative that literal, the stumbling blocks are brass plates, about three inches square, set into the sidewalks generally in groups of three, four, five. Each grouping of plates generally bears a single family's names -- mother, father, children, grandparents -- who lived in the building outside of which the plates have been placed. They were the Jews swept away. In addition to an individual name, each plaque bears its namesake's year of birth, year of death, and place and manner of dying. A few were ambiguous: "Buchenwald, died." Most were not: "Auschwitz, murdered."

Had Irene not first pointed out to me these stumbling blocks, I might well have walked on and over them unnoticed. Once she pointed them out to me, however, I saw them all over. Every few buildings in the Mitte there would be another cluster of stumbling blocks. There was no escaping them. And there was no escaping how many of them recorded lifespans in the single digits. To be one, two, or three, and already so despised by a massive world power to be put to death.

Some of the stumbling blocks are not in clusters, and not victims of the camps, however. We came across two several blocks distant from each other that had not been murdered at Auschwitz nor died ambiguously in Buchenwald. Instead, one, a young 22-year old man, and the other, an older man, a lawyer, both died in a notorious Gestapo prison, executed, perhaps, for being Communists. Both were Jewish and likely to have been killed, anyway, but it was probably their politics which did them in first.

These stumbling blocks are neither a government program nor a uniquely Berlin phenomenon. Irene told me that the people who live in the homes formerly occupied by the Jewish families pay 90 euros to purchase and place the stumbling blocks. And she said people are putting down stumbling blocks all over Germany. The project is ongoing. Current residents are continuously making connections with their past.

According to Berlin's Jewish Museum (this one time a source other than Irene, though she corroborated it, so I trust it), in 1933 there were approximately 520,000 Jews living in Germany. By the end of the war, 215,000 of those Jews perished. The difference in the two figures represents those who fled before the camps became their fate. I wonder if Germans will ever get close to fixing a stumbling block for each deserving name, and if so, what the streets will look like, then.
 
Irene, a not-so-typical typical German woman, and a non-Jew, helped me see beyond my own fear and more importantly, my own bias. I can't account for why Germans of the '30s and '40s allowed the Holocaust to develop, and worse, helped develop it, but my sense from spending four days in Berlin plus one morning is that today's Germans are quite willing to shoulder a past not of their own making so that the past of their own making resembles nothing like the one they inherited.