Totally Normal?

ROLNICK, JOSH

Totally Normal GERMANY STILL FEELS UNCOMFORTABLE WITH JEWS, AND JEWS DON'T QUITE FEEL AT HOME THERE. JOSH ROLNICK Everywhere, there are bodies in motion. Hundreds dance on the ; main floor and in...

...It's time Germany came off the list of places they don't want to go...
...They were sitting on packed suitcases...
...It's another part of Judaism in Germany that was destroyed...
...The population stayed at that level until the 1980s, when it shrank slightly...
...Films, books, and exhibits on Jewish and Israel topics draw ever-larger audiences...
...Ashamed, she eventually joined a local group of non-Jews called the Synagogue Patrons Society, which restored the building's exterior...
...I wanted to do away with these divisions," said Bubis, who was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), in 1927...
...During the war, the Nazis used it as a movie theater...
...While many Jews said they don't face anti-Semitism, they are not as confident that Germans are contrite about their past...
...And with it, a photo of Ignatz Bubis, whose unwavering vision was that German Jews should live normal lives, with a bull's eve over his face...
...The trip was designed, he said, "to help you help your readers to stop thinking about not including Germany" in their travel plans...
...I don't think anti-Semitism plays any role in the life of the average Jew...
...the villagers, some of whom would later say they didn't know what had been going on in their midst, are standing on porches and in the street, gawking...
...This trend was already evident in 1997, when Bubis told the Jerusalem Post Magazine "You can't sell books on Christianity, but books on Jewish history, culture, and religion, and on the Holocaust, sell very well...
...Anti-Semitism continued declining through the late 1960s, as the younger generation adopted a critical view of their elders' complicity, he says...
...In America the Nazis can march in Skokie with heil Hitler salutes and swastikas, and they can't do that here," says Lieberberg, the owner of the Capitol...
...Here, when you are confronted with it, it catches you oft guard because it pulls the nig out from under your feet...
...The goal of the German National Tourist Office is to demonstrate that Jews are not only welcome but desired 60 years after perhaps the most appalling crime ever committed on the planet," Geoffrey Weill, a consultant for the tourist office, told us the first gray morning of the tour...
...We are Jews, and we're proud to be Jews," says Asaf Schwartz, 17, of Franldurt "We have nightlife and girlfriends, and we go to shul like normal Jews, and we have goyishe friends...
...Of the 120 students attending Heidelberg's College of Jewish Studies, 100 were not Jewish...
...Selling the 'Germany' Brand Name I went to Germany with five other Jewish journalists on a nine-day tour sponsored by the German National Tourist Board, which receives most of its funding (35 million DM, or about $19 million, in 1997) from the Ministry of Economic Affairs...
...By comparison, the Anti-Defamation League reports that the United States had 1,722 anti-Semitic incidents that year, a 7 percent decrease from the previous year...
...But Nachama says the neo-Nazis are able to get away with anti-Semitic marches by portraying their rallies in legally acceptable terms...
...In the article, tided "Germany's New Jewish Obsession," the Jerusalem Post reported that academic degrees in Jewish studies were becoming far more popular— and that almost all the people enrolled were non-Jews...
...Kauders agrees, and goes one step farther...
...The high, vaulted ceiling...
...And with the floodgates opened, Russian Jews fleeing anti-Semitism or seeking economic opportunity began arriving en masse, radically changing the complexion of the German Jewish community...
...German Jews say they generally feel safe in the "new," reunited Germany...
...The documentary attracted about half the normal viewership for its time slot...
...A full 37 percent of Germans felt that, "the Holocaust is not relevant today because it happened almost 50 years ago...
...Outside, next to the main door, there is a black-and-white photo of a hunched, elderly Jewish man being herded into an army Jeep with his wife tor deportation...
...It jarred people again...
...The answer is: It's still not totally normal...
...in 1989 there were only 27,000 Jews in Germany, about 800 less than seven years earlier...
...There's a lot of anti-Semitism m the States—a lot of white power...
...The German press was flooded with letters praising Walser for courageously saying what many secretly felt...
...She called it Totally Normal...
...She followed three 21-year-old Jews around with a movie camera for six months, ultimately producing a documentary that aired on German public television in April...
...It served as a theater until a team of entrepreneurs led by Lieberberg and two other Jews spent 4 million DM (about $2.1 million) to convert it into a discotheque, which opened in October 1998...
...Even if you have the same anti-Semitism here that you would encounter somewhere else, here 1 immediately have to connect it with the holocaust," she says...
...Germany, motivated by its responsibility for the Holocaust, quickly passed the Contingent Refugee Law of 1991, giving preferential immigration treatment to Soviet Jews who wanted to come to Germany...
...For only die second rime since the war, the German government was sponsoring a press trip specifically designed to attract Jews...
...And fearing his grave would be desecrated, Bubis, who had resettled in Germany after being released from a Polish labor camp, decided to be buried in Israel...
...But even with the influx, Jews still make up less than 1 percent of Germany's 82 million population...
...Kosher cafes are hip in Berlin, and Christian girls wear Stars of David around their necks...
...Halberstam says the Holocaust remains a powerful shaper of everyday life...
...when Hider took power in 1933 there were still more than half a million Jews...
...Joerger asked her parents about the building, which she thought resembled a church, and they told her it used to be a synagogue...
...The German Jews Jewish life in Germany dates back to the fourth century, when the first Jewish merchants settled in Roman-built towns along the Rhine...
...The comments sparked an extended public dispute in Germany, in part because, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, "the challenge came not from die rightist fringe but from a man of the intellectual and moral center...
...At first glance, the Capitol discotheque, in an industrial town on the outskirts of Frankfurt, is just a night club like any other...
...Most people were second generation, and they didn't feel at home here...
...More than 4,000 Russians arrived in 1990, and another 41,000 have arrived since, making Germany the only European country with a substantially increasing Jewish community...
...Lieberberg notes that the local Jewish community didn't want the building anymore and that once the Torah was removed, it ceased being holy...
...Last week some girl asked me, 'You are Jewish...
...They are unalarmed that the capital has moved back to Berlin for the first time since the war...
...He wanted Jewish life to be accepted within the Federal Republic of Germany," Andreas Nachama, the head of the Berlin Jewish community, told me over lunch recently at an Israeli-style restaurant in Berlin...
...In an interview with Stem magazine in July, a month before he died, Bubis said he had accomplished "nearly nothing" during his 16 years as president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany...
...Even today, as vibrant Jewish communities resurrect themselves from the ashes of the Holocaust, the concept of "normal" for Germany's 75,000 Jews remains elusive...
...Today it is hard to find an institution of higher learning in Germany that does not offer some program in Jewish studies," the newspaper wrote...
...Germans nowadays are not anti-Semites...
...Germany was not a place we saw our future in," says Myriam Halberstam, a 37-vear-old Berlin filmmaker...
...German Jews point out that if you want to find anti-Semites, you don't have to travel all the way to Germany...
...If there is a danger for Jews, it could easily be in America...
...she said...
...Three dancers on raised stages reflect glittering neon fight from silver-sheathed skin, while on the main stage, in a haze of tobacco smoke, four DJs work furiously lining up tracks...
...For Bubis, Walser's remarks amounted to nothing less than "moral arson...
...The Jewish population peaked at over 600,000 in 1910...
...Halberstam says that for many Jewish Germans, the Walser-Bubis feud and the ensuing flood of public support for Walser came as a shock...
...On Jerusalem Day, the Dusseldorf Jews threw a block part)'—but the majority of revelers were Germans who came to eat falafel and listen to Hasidic bands...
...We're just living...
...The country criminalized Holocaust denial in 1985 and recently banned the distribution and publication of neo-Nazi material on the Internet...
...Intellectual nationalism is spreading, and it is not free of an understated anti-Semitism...
...I looked around, and I thought, how is it possible that Jews could make a discotheque out of this place...
...the note reads...
...The Holocaust skews an otherwise ordinary interaction between Jews and non-Jews, Halberstam says...
...The U-shaped, split-level seating...
...Anti-Semitism Sitting over a cup of coffee at the Schwartzescafe, Gerda Nueman, 22, and her sister Regina, 21, tell me that the neo-Nazis march once a year in Berlin, in April, around Hider's birthday...
...For more information on this topic: visit our Web site at www.momentmag.com and click on Related Links...
...In a speech accepting Germany's top literary award, Walser said that Auschwitz shouldn't become a "routine threat, a tool of intimidation, a moral cudgel, or just a compulsory' exercise...
...We are exotic here," says Miguel Freund, a member of die board of directors of Cologne's Great Roonstrasse Synagogue...
...That just shows that there are still things I have to fight for here...
...On this day, my parents don't want me to go outside," Gerda says...
...There is a new Germany that is safe for Jews and yet a Germany that continues grappling with its past...
...The debate clearly resonated with Jews, who say they cannot relax—let alone accept Germany as their home—if Germans are eager to put their past behind them...
...His whole career he said, 'I'm a German who's Jewish,' and [just before he died] he says, Tm a Jew who lives in Germany, and I want to be buried in my home in Israel.' He was saving to the Germans, 'Wake up!'" Everyday Life— Routinely Different Halberstam knows a thing or two about what everyday life is like for German Jews...
...But according to Halberstam, the heated debate between Bubis and the prominent German writer Martin Walser, which began in October 1998, went a long way to undoing much of the fragile latticework of trust that had been built up between the Jewish community and the rest of Germany...
...But in Germany, where every statement about the Holocaust is analyzed and reanalyzed, where so many buildings, alleys, and cemeteries are fraught with symbolic meaning (there are 800 memorial plaques for Jews in Berlin alone), perhaps it's no surprise that the club has generated heated debate...
...The question was, How normal is it for young Jews to live in Germany today...
...If a German says something anti-Semitic, you feel differently than if an American says something anti-Semitic...
...East and West Germany reunited on October 3, 1990...
...On the contrary, they said, many Germans— including some respected figures from the political center—are doing exactly that...
...A small exhibit inside the synagogue describes the former Jewish community—all in all, a tribute to non-Jewish Germans who place a premium on historical memory...
...The message came through clearly...
...People who had started to feel okay all of the sudden felt that nothing had changed...
...most people, very often, haven't seen a Jew before...
...I think maybe he just wanted to shock the Germans," Schwartz said...
...Here Germans, there Jews...
...Like, for instance, the day the tourist ¦ nice bused us to Kippenheim, a sleepy village not far from the French border...
...One item in particular catches my eye...
...Even the main stage, where the DJs pirouette in perpetual motion...
...And, when the Jewish Community Center of Berlin holds triannual registration for Hebrew and Yiddish classes, about 300 people, mostly non-Jews, wait several hours in line to enroll...
...According to a 1997 joint report on anti-Semitism by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the American Jewish Committee, there were 846 anti-Semitic crimes in Germany in 1996, down 309 incidents from the previous year—a 27 percent drop...
...More than four decades after the Germans sought to ship Jews out in railcars, they were flying us back, business class no less, to promote Jewish tourism...
...There are a small number of really militant anti-Semites whose political aim is to get all foreigners out of Germany," Nachama says...
...The Jewish kids know" that the dance hall was once a synagogue, says co-owner David Lieberberg...
...How long do we want to feed these parasites, and how many generations of us are supposed to pay for nothing and nothing again...
...But this trip was different...
...Yet the committee's poll also found that more Germany continued from page 62 than one in five Germans have negative feelings toward Jews...
...we dined in the stunning restaurant atop the Reichstag, then visited Villa Wannsee, where the Nazis coordinated the Final Solution...
...The entire debate seemed to lend credence to a widely cited 1994 American Jewish Committee poll, in which 52 percent of Germans agreed that "Today, in the aftermath of German unification, we should not talk so much about the Holocaust, but should rather draw a line under the past...
...And the next month, Schroder, marking the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, remarked that it's time "we look ahead without forgetting what happened...
...Remembering the Holocaust "When I was a kid...
...In a remark that is not uncommon, a Berlin journalist who writes for the biggest financial newspaper in Germany told me, "I don't know a single German Jew...
...And I explained that we also believe in God, but not in Jesus...
...They describe lively Jewish communal life, particularly in Frankfurt and Berlin, where Jewish schools, camps, youth groups, and cultural events flourish...
...But if you happen to be Jewish, you might notice something else—something vaguely familiar and, to some, a little unsettling...
...But on the other hand...
...There are many Jews who are very reluctant to come here, even though they may drive a Mercedes or use a Krups coffeemaker," he said, adding, "Just as the world has always had stereotypical impressions of Jews that were wrong, Jewish Americans also have stereotypical impressions of Germans...
...Some would take issue with Weill's statement that "nobody's ever suggesting that the past should be set aside...
...After the war, some 200,000 displaced Jews (who had been in concentration or forced labor camps) took refuge in the American-occupied German zone, but most eventually left...
...Walser's speech is something that is more and more widespread of late," Bubis said...
...When Nathan Englander, the American Jewish author who writes short stories about Orthodox Jews, gave a reading at a small Berlin bookstore recently, he attracted an overflow crowd even though there had been almost no advance publicity...
...Much of the tour was designed to make a point: While the Germans have created a new state, they are not forgetting the past...
...In the center of town sits the old synagogue, built in 1850, destroyed on Kristallnacht, and sold after the war to an agricultural cooperative...
...It set everything back," she said...
...We also want to show that we are dealing with our history and not shutting our eyes...
...Germans think, '"How can I be normal to a person who is Jewish with the load of the Holocaust on my back?' That makes such a meeting very awkward, and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism...
...Perhaps this explains why Bubis and many other German Jews found Walser's comments so offensive...
...Additionally, about 6,000 German Jews returned after the war, and 2,000 Jews from other countries settled there—boosting the total population (including the remnant of the original Jewish population and their descendants) to about 28,000 by the late 1960s...
...But 95 percent of the people who come here don't...
...Those packed suitcases kind of disappeared ten years ago...
...Instead of marching on April 20, Hider's actual birthday, they march a few days earlier...
...Wherever you go in Germany, when people hear you are Jewish, they are interested," she said...
...It is a scribbled note that had been hurled anonymously into the synagogue during the restoration work and displayed by the patrons as a reminder of the long road ahead in Germany...
...Anthony Kauders, a historian of German anti-Semitism, says Germans exhibited a strong anti-Semitic streak after World War II that did not begin to subside until press coverage of the war crime trials in the 1950s, culminating with the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961...
...Like in so many other German villages, there are no Jews left here...
...Later, the decimated Jewish community sold it to the city...
...Yet there's a flip side to this fascination...
...Schwartz, the Frankfurt teen, thinks Bubis was trying to make a statement about Jewish life in Germany by taking Walser to task...
...And so we visited the proud living synagogue in Stuttgart and then the vestiges of the concentration camp at Sach-senhausen...
...But some Jews won't go...
...They are largely concentrated in the big cities: 11,000 in Berlin, 6,700 in Frankfurt, 6,600 in Munich, 3,500 in Cologne, 4,000 in Hamburg, and 2,300 in Stuttgart...
...Jews go to the club because they like the music...
...The theme recurred like a well-worn slogan...
...That a Jewish German could take a synagogue destroyed in the violence of Kristallnacht and turn it into a hot spot where Jewish teens mingle anonymously with their German peers is emblematic of the "normalcy" of Jewish life in Germany today...
...In Germany, anti-Jewish incitement has been a criminal offense since 1960...
...All [Germans] complain that there is too much discussion about the Holocaust," says Maggy Scanckower, 21, who works in the Frankfurt ad firm of Ogilvy and Mather Focus...
...What is Jewish...
...Do you go to church?'" said Yael, a 17-year-old Frankfurt Jew, whose father asked that her last name be withheld...
...He thought that Jewish life should be accepted inside and outside Germany as something totally normal...
...But...
...The result, in part, is a buzz surrounding all things Jewish...
...And yet, after a lifetime of trying to get German Jews to do exactly that, Ignatz Bubis, the recently deceased head of the German Jewish community, declared his efforts a failure...
...You'd be hard-pressed to find a Wall Street Journal reporter who could make the same claim...
...Around the same time, members of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's new government were questioning plans for a Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin (a slightly scaled down version has since been approved...
...About 20 percent of Germans said Jews have "too much influence" in C lerman society, and another 22 percent said they'd "prefer not" to have Jews as neighl>ors...
...It's all normal, like it should be...
...In addition to being viewed through the lens of the Holocaust, Jews are seen as something different— something not easily understood...
...They have self-declared 'nationally liberated zones' surrounding Berlin...
...By 1960 about 6,000 had become members of the German Jewish community...
...Tourism is a way to show that our country' has changed," said Udo Grebe of the tourist board...
...says 18-year-old Lisa Fudim of Frankfurt...
...Susanne Joerger, a 37-year-old Catholic, used to go to the co-op as a child to buy insecticide for her father, who ran a nearby vineyard...
...The trend in Mr...
...The League of Nations high commissioner for refugees estimates that 315,000 Jews left Germany between 1933 and 1939...
...But at the end of the day, when the tour bus stopped rolling and I went out on my own, I encountered a more nuanced message...
...In no other country would you get this high percentage of non-Jewish interest in Jewish culture and history...
...Germany is the least anti-Semitic country m western Europe," the historian says...
...Yet Halberstam says it's different...
...Mass transfer of Jews to Eastern European ghettoes and concentration camps began in 1941, and by 1944 there were only 14,500 Jews left who were not imprisoned—mainly spouses of non-Jews and underground survivors...
...The younger people want to know 'What is Judaism?' because of the past," says Nicola Galliner, who heads the adult education center...
...There is anti-Semitism in Germany— it would be a lie to deny that," says Xachama, noting that just a few days earlier neo-Nazis had desecrated Berlin's largest Jewish cemetery...
...It would seem that Germany's Jews have finally unpacked their symbolic suitcases...
...The building was the main Offenbach synagogue between 1916 and November 9, 1938, when it was destroyed in Kristallnacht...
...There's an intimidation...
...The board has been promoting tourism in Germany for more than 50 years, in part by flying in journalists from around the world...
...and the Soviet Union collapsed the following year...
...And instead of a pro-Hider rally, their official line might be that they are demonstrating against the Holocaust memorial, which is perfectly legal...
...He also said German shame shouldn't be "exploited for present purposes" and that "if the media present this past every day, I feel in myself something that begins to resist the permanent presentation of our shame...
...Everybody was in a cozy slumber and...
...Hundreds dance on the ; main floor and in the balcony, fists pumping the air as the first chords of Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" pulse from giant speakers...
...That's when history' intervened: The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989...
...It is impossible to be both exotic and normal at the same rime...
...it made us realize that maybe Jews and Germans aren't thinking along the same lines...

Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1


 
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