Return To Berlin: An Epitaph For German Judaism
FACKENHEIM, EMIL
RETURN TO BERLIN AN EPITAPH FOR GERMAN JUDAISM 1.1 was released from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen on February 8, 1939. Together with thousands of other German Jews I had been arrested...
...few others have the prayerbook before them...
...Returning home, I wondered: should I contact my few remaining German friends before leaving the country...
...Orthodox-service and not to the Liberal one...
...At one time it was thousands...
...And to the extent that any German Jews have been noticed, it is largely the assimilated Jews, intellectuals alienated from Judaism (whether, as in former days, they were denounced for assimilating or, as currently in many quarters, they are objects of a posthumous celebration...
...More people...
...Whatever the answers-I had no time to stay and find out-it is good that the old cemetery is left untouched, as a monument to the history of Jews and Judaism in Germany...
...It was my first time in Berlin since I had left from Tempelhof Airport on May 12, 1939...
...But the possibility of a Holocaust surely never entered his mind...
...I heard it in my mind's ear all the while, as I had once heard it so often spoken aloud by Nazi Sprechchoere: "Wirdanken unserem Fuehrer" -"We thank our Fuehrer...
...Most appropriate because never before and rarely since has there been a place where the meaning of Judaism for our time was so intensely studied and reflected on...
...What else had I expected...
...Can she be rebuilt...
...Indeed, two or three years ago I might have agreed to come back...
...And it is confirmed whenever one switches on the radio and listens to "their" news, or what they call news...
...This is a custom among classical scholars when friends part...
...And the Weimar Republic was in turn succeeded by a regime that was the most deliberate, most systematic, most horrendous destruction of right by might in all of human history...
...Together with thousands of other German Jews I had been arrested and imprisoned there following the so-called Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938...
...If only the Germans understood, they would feel an unprecedented closeness to, and identification with, the Jewish people, for the same Third Reich-whose 12 years were equal to a thousand-that murdered one third of the Jewish people also destroyed Germany...
...It could have been worse...
...Actually, by then only one friend from my high school days was left, and he did not contact me...
...For my companion-hardly a German, but decidedly a Berliner, his father bom in Berlin, so, too, after the war and the camps, he-the Potsdamer Platz was the most awesome sight...
...But after what has happened now I know that the Jewish people will need me more...
...It is not as bad as I feared, is my first reaction as I enter: a hundred or so worshipers...
...And let it be remembered that even Franz Rosenzweig (whom no one can accuse of craven assimilation or lack of Jewish identity) once wanted to bring Bach's music into the synagogue...
...Germany will be destroyed, and we shall need you to help rebuild her...
...But will the interest deepen or widen with the passage of time...
...I think not...
...There we saw what in a way was the worst spectacle of all: not stormtroopers but rather respectable citizens, fashionably dressed, stepping over all that broken glass into Jewish store windows, and helping themselves to shoes, dresses and the like...
...2.1 reported this conversation in October 1983, when I gave my first Emit L. Fackenheim is the author of, among other works, Quest for Past and Future, Paths to Jewish Belief and The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought...
...After having been body-searched thoroughly by two armed policemen, I enter the synagogue for Friday night services...
...I agree that Germany will be destroyed...
...In a theological discussion during my 1983 visit no one other than I seemed to refer to Kant or Hegel...
...As I walk out I realize that the mood of worship I felt at the beginning has been replaced by nostalgia, and that I have participated in a memorial concert rather than in a service...
...All this, of course, came to an abrupt, total, brutal end when on the night of November 9, 1938, synagogues were burning all over Germany, Jewish property was smashed and stolen, and Jewish mer vanished one knew not (but could guess) where...
...Is this accidental...
...On the day I arrived a youth had succeeded in getting across the Wall...
...The dedication above the entrance says "Dem Deutschen Volke-For the German People...
...These men and their work have inspired, and will continue to inspire, Judaism in other lands...
...Why shouldn't there be some talking...
...Of that synagogue, burnt down like all the others, only the front portal remains...
...With these words in my head, a talmudic saying comes back as well: If only the Gentiles understood, they would mourn the destruction of the Temple more than the Jews...
...In a way, the question was answered at the climax of my Berlin tour: the Wall...
...I thought for a moment and replied: "Dr...
...There was a time when the poet Heinrich Heine (who was a great Jew and also a great German) was unable to sleep when during the night he would think about Germany...
...Surely it is only in the hope of redemption that a Jew can pray in the Berlin of today at all...
...Like many Berlin buildings, it is located behind an inner court...
...But the fate that has befallen German Judaism itself is illustrated by one of its last great products...
...Among the Berlin street names that I recognized were those of poets and philosophers, Kantstrasse, Schellingstrasse, Lessingstrasse and so on...
...And on Shabbat we would attend the crowded synagogue services, inspired by both the music and sermons of Leo Baeck and Max Wiener, Joachim Prinz and Manfred Swarsensky...
...In the evening I attended Shabbat services at a synagogue in my own tradition, the only Liberal synagogue in Berlin, located on Pestalozzistrasse...
...4. My Berlin tour had taken place on a Friday afternoon...
...They had shot but missed, and he had only broken his leg when jumping down...
...There is some reason to believe that the work (and other works that are the heritage of German Judaism) will be studied by Germans: and this may have some bearing on the unanswered question of whether Germany is being rebuilt or can be rebuilt...
...It is full of graffiti, some of the John-loves-Jane variety, some, more apt, denouncing communist oppression and demanding the removal of the Wall...
...Once it was a glittering center of activity...
...the religious-seemed to be all Christians and the "bad" atheist Jews like Marx and Freud, I was happily surprised at the ending, a retelling of a Chassidic story...
...On the day after that night-I was not arrested until the next day-a friend and I, foolishly enough, but sure that this was a day for the history books and had to be experienced, walked up and down t) famous Kurfuerstendamm...
...So much has had to be rebuilt...
...Now, a student of linguistics tells me, words such as Volk are avoided by sensitive Germans...
...Where are you from...
...Of course, I know that the phrase is controversial and omitted in many synagogues...
...The Berlin sign just had to be a line from one of the two most famous songs emerging from the Holocaust...
...Of a once-great, thousand-year-old community, only a small, accidental remnant...
...What would be the most apt legend of all, however, was nowhere in sight...
...The 1983 address was in the Papst Johannes Haus in Krefeld, to a group of Christians...
...But by the time Buber completed the work ip 1961-Rosenzweig had died in 1929-the readership addressed no longer existed...
...I am going to live in Jerusalem...
...But, as Leo Baeck, my midrash professor during my Hochschule days, recognized as early as 1933, the one-thousand-year-old history of German Jews has come to an end...
...and if they wished they could contact me...
...In short, a few synagogues continue to exist in what once was the Jerusalem of Western Europe...
...These are questions for others to worry over...
...A stark sign reminds those entering of the six million-as indeed does everything in this building...
...He was in the hospital, showered by West Berliners with flowers and candy...
...I was a student at the Berlin Liberal rabbinical seminary, the famed Hochschule fuerdie Wissenschaft des Judentums, from 1935 to 1938...
...Very sad...
...A few days before my Krefeld meeting I had by chance heard a learned radio lecture on the subject of atheism...
...At one time, if any city deserved the name of the Jerusalem of Western Europe, it was Berlin...
...After that war came the Weimar Republic-right without might, or as the late Leo Strauss put it, "the sorry spectacle of justice without the sword, or justice unable to use the sword...
...After my own Krefeld address was finished, an old man came up to me and said: "You have listened to your old teacher after all...
...Or, is it "how much longer...
...But only to visit...
...I replied: "It is true we are sitting on a powder keg, but we must be calm and bold enough to smoke a cigar while sitting on it...
...A medieval legend I was taught at school has it that Emperor Barbarossa sits inside the Kyffhaeuser mountain, his red beard growing ever longer, waiting for der Tag when he can reappear, recreate in a new form the glory that once was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and thus realize German destiny...
...In post-Holocaust Berlin, most offensive, I feel...
...Also, 10 or 20 must have been visitors from abroad, such as I. There is a story about the visiting Gentiles...
...Yet to be appreciated are the ordinary Jewish citizens-my own parents among them-who were able to reconcile a genuine, upright commitment to Judaism with a no less genuine participation in the social and cultural German reality around them...
...address on German soil in 45 years, adding that my last such address had been on Yom Kippur 1938^ in the Baden-Baden synagogue just before they burned it down...
...And so I understood: the Third Reich, which murdered most of the Jews of Europe, also destroyed a spiritual reality to which I was deeply attached from childhood on, and which lasted from Moses Mendelssohn to Leo Baeck...
...But they've just got to be ravens, I thought...
...Now that some Christians in Germany are willing, or indeed eager, to listen to Jews, what Jews are left to speak to them...
...It is good that the portal was left standing...
...Even for the mere 15 minutes or so that we meant to stay, my hostess locked the gate from inside...
...I didn't know, and neither did he...
...I had learned much on my visit to Germany a year earlier...
...And when one climbs up the steps one sees, on "their" side, a desolation and a dreariness that are difficult to imagine...
...But the rebuilding will have to be done by others...
...Stoehr ended as follows: "We Christians have to begin at the very beginning, with the first two questions of the Bible: 'Where are you, man?' And 'Where is your brother?'" Stoehr's words filled me with love, but also with sadness...
...Suspicious of German nationalism (and especially of the romantic kind that longed for a revival of the Middle Ages), Hegel had aimed at nothing larger than Prussia...
...But the synagogue in which there still is real worship is not really in Berlin at all, for it could be anywhere...
...After the service, a kiddush and a meal, during which the rabbi makes a speech, bragging that a rabbi is visiting us from Haifa, and that he would come to the only authentic-i.e...
...I understand that only one of the few synagogues remaining in Berlin is visible as such from the street...
...In the Moscow synagogue, too, there is a sign on the wall, referring to the Jewish people as the "children of Aaron," lest, if referred to as "children of Israel," they be suspected of a connection with that imperialist-fascist-militaristic entity, the State of Israel...
...In 1925 Buber and Rosenzweig set out to produce a new kind of translation of the Hebrew Bible into German: They set out to make the German language speak Hebrew...
...It is true that the instrument was borrowed from the church, and that as such it comes into the category of chukkat hagoy-Gentile custom-that is viewed with suspicion when imported into Judaism...
...Behind it lies the new, modest Jewish community center...
...Loercher, I have never disagreed with you before...
...The text is before him, and I read it with him, except that he omits the phrase that refers to the State of Israel as "the first flowering of our redemption...
...Not very deep, not very widespread, is my impression...
...Surely the new cemetery was not established with the old one still half empty: What caused the emptiness...
...But (as will emerge in the course of this telling), only after my return to Berlin do I understand (or think I understand) why in all these years I have found it so hard to revisit Germany...
...So is the Orthodox synagogue on Joachimstalerstrasse which I attended the next morning...
...It is what Times Square is, or used to be, for New Yorkers...
...A hundred Liberal Jews attending Friday night services in all of Berlin...
...So of course I went...
...the subject, but it was obvious that he had never discussed Chassidism with a knowledgeable Jew, presumably for lack of opportunity...
...On the part of the Jews it was real enough...
...Not because of our Christian faith, but because one third of the Jewish people was murdered...
...For my companion the Potsdamer Platz may have been the most awesome sight...
...Bismarck, I thought, must turn over in his grave...
...But is anything but the street names left, or being rebuilt...
...Why doesn't anyone report what that awful, awesome place is really like...
...Inside, nearly half the space is empty...
...He telephoned me and said: "Fackenheim, if you will not come to visit me I shall never forgive you...
...The exchange is ended and, shocked, I wonder what on earth the old man could have meant...
...A very engaging, interesting young Jewish Berliner was glad to oblige...
...6. My last significant act on this trip to Germany was a visit to the old Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt...
...Much better, is my first impression...
...and I kept wondering, what other capital (or former capital) gives so much honor in its street names to poets and philosophers...
...He retold the story correctly-but he mispronounced the word "Chassidism...
...I later heard a similar story in Stuttgart...
...But how can he wait for the Messiah, in, of all places, post-Holocaust Berlin...
...And just how well his suspicions were founded was proved in the First World War, instigated by poor disciples and heirs of Bismarck, and no disciples at all of Hegel...
...Certainly it was the Jerusalem of Liberal Judaism, and no building expressed this with ! greater magnificence than the famous I Fasanenstrasse-Synagogue, festively ! inaugurated in 1912 in the presence of prominent government officials...
...Then followed a ruthlessly honest account of anti-Semitism in Christendom, tolerated if not encouraged throughout Christian history, its theology included...
...for me, never a Berliner but once-eternities ago, it seems-a German, the most awesome sight was the other chief place for sightseers, the Reichstag, dilapidated and, aptly enough, a museum, on "our" side...
...What birds are these...
...What in German Liberal Judaism gave the organ Jewish legitimacy was the music of German-Jewish synagogue composers of whom Lewandowski was the greatest...
...Perhaps I have missed the stories and pictures...
...It is true, as the late Gershom Scholem kept stressing, that the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis was always unreal on the part of the Germans...
...I try to join in the singing of the choir, but it seems that no one else does...
...Only later do I learn from the rabbi that about 30 of those attending are visiting Gentiles...
...Why are there no adequate pictures...
...And if you want me to I'll come back again...
...3.1 repeated the story of my Greek teacher when in November 19841 returned to Germany, this time to address a Jewish audience...
...In a Liberal synagogue of Berlin it is not...
...But omit it in Berlin...
...There are stands, specially built for the purpose, on which visitors can climb up the steps and look across...
...As for German Judaism, it cannot be rebuilt, and all that remains is an epitaph...
...Just this, I suppose: that there might not even be a minyan...
...5. Because of the larger, vaster tragedy of European Jewry as a whole, the very special tragedy of the German Jews-they were murdered, so to speak, by the people with whom they went to school-has found insufficient attention...
...and there is ample room for the tourist buses that always seem to be there, as well as for booths where pop and souvenirs are sold...
...The synagogue is a meeting place also, and for all I know the one time in the week that these Berlin Jews meet is on Shabbat in* shul...
...A mental note: communism equals dreariness, an equation my wife and I had already arrived at when, during a visit with refuseniks some years earlier, we walked the streets of several cities in the Soviet Union...
...In the years between 1935 and 1938, Berlin, or more precisely Jewish Berlin and more specifically still the Hochschule, was at once the most absurd and the most appropriate place for the study of Judaism...
...Jerusalem, but I lived here as a student over 40 years ago...
...TOM HUMMH 5745 I have yet to meet a Jew in Germany who could bear to live there were it not for the strength derived from the knowledge that there is a Jewish state...
...The service begins, and from the first sound of the organ I am deeply moved...
...I had asked my hosts for a volunteer, an owner of a car, willing to spend an afternoon taking me around...
...Or perhaps one must be there and see it for oneself...
...Half the gravestones were overturned: What caused it, the ravages of time or of Nazi vandalism...
...The group wishing to attend was three times as large, but they were asked to come some at a time, lest the visitors outnumber the worshipers, and the worship cease to be a service and become an exhibition or display...
...Then why do we want to listen to Jews now...
...It was also-to quote Strauss again-"the only German regime-the only regime ever anywhere-which had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of Jews, for 'Aryan' had no clear meaning other than 'non-Jewish.'" (The Japanese, after all, were honorary Aryans...
...Better not, I decided, for I might endanger them...
...I recognized the street signs but very little else...
...Reading the Torah...
...But how deep, how widespread among the millions who lived through it all is the interest to come and ponder the significance of this place and all it represents...
...Next morning I attend services at the Orthodox synagogue...
...I had completed high school in my native city of Halle in 1935 but, at his insistence, had remained regularly in touch with him while a rabbinical student in Berlin...
...In the week I began my studies my father was arrested for six weeks by the Gestapo...
...But has Germany been rebuilt, or is she being rebuilt, in the sense meant by my old teacher...
...I do not apologize...
...The sign reads: "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and although he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming...
...The lecturer may have studied Chassidism, the mystical Jewish movement that was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe and survives vigorously to this day, or perhaps he had at least read earnestly some of Martin Buber's writings on EMIL FACKENHE1M The Wall...
...And it could not be, "Never say you walk the last road," the song of the Vilna Ghetto resistance fighters, for then the synagogue would have to be not in Berlin but in Israel...
...Later during the service I am accosted by an old Jew...
...If in the Liberal synagogue one cannot forget for a moment one's time and place, everything in the Orthodox synagogue is marked by a total absence of a knowledge of both...
...The Brandenburger Tor, once the pride of Prussia, is on the other side, and between the two is that Wall, to climb which is to risk death...
...But (far more important to me than Bismarck) so must Hegel...
...Also on the way out I notice a sign on the wall...
...The heart of Germany, however, only much later than the Middle Ages...
...The habit of talking during the service is an old one...
...I looked at the dreariness beyond the Wall and then more closely at the Wall itself...
...He had ready two copies, properly inscribed, of Martin Buber's Koenigtum Gottes, one for himself to keep, the other for me to take...
...and in the synagogue which is permeated with a deep knowledge of its time and place, worship has turned into mourning and memory...
...One Liberal synagogue in all of Berlin...
...I took my copy and have it to this day...
...Maimonides, the author of the statement, must have had many Jewish catastrophes in mind when, judiciously enough, he included the words "although he tarry...
...At the height of his career teaching at the newly-founded Berlin University, Hegel had attempted to develop a political philosophy in which might is synthesized with right...
...It destroyed German Judaism...
...I was contacted by my former high school Greek teacher...
...And the Haifa rabbi should have suspended his Orthodox scruples in this place and attended services at the Liberal synagogue also...
...My studies ended, abruptly, with the Kristallnacht, concentration camp and flight from Germany...
...The Army and indeed even the Kaiser himself were represented...
...I feel quite at home until, having been called up to hold the Torah, I stand right next to the rabbi while he recites the prayer for the State of Israel...
...I embraced him in turn and replied: "Yes, I have come back...
...The very last place on earth where it ought to be omitted, and I have yet to meet a Jew in Berlin-or, for that matter, in Germany-who could bear to live in Germany were it not for the strength derived from the knowledge that there is-as, alas, then there was not-a Jewish state...
...Harking back to the 13th century, it was used until the mid-19th, when a new site was found...
...but so long as the ravens still fly around the mountain, the time has not yet arrived...
...And now, my first return to Berlin...
...There is a vast empty space separating East Berlin from the Wall, so that at least here no one would even attempt to climb the Wall: He would be gunned down before getting near it...
...But then it all becomes clear-the rabbi's omission during the prayer for the State of Israel, the old man's comment, and the behavior of the two rabbis at the kiddush...
...I have a siddur in front of me...
...And it bore rich intellectual and spiritual fruit in such figures as the neo-Orthodox Samson Raphael Hirsch and the liberal Abraham Geiger, in the Hegelian Samuel Hirsch and the post-Hegelian Zionist Moses Hess, in the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen and the post-idealists Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and, among my own teachers at the Hochschule, in unforgettable persons such as Ismar Elbogen and Max Wiener, Eugen Taeubler and Leo Baeck...
...Why doesn't anyone report what that awful, awesome place is really like...
...So I never saw him again, for, though an anti-Nazi to the end of his life, he was killed on the Russian front, fighting Hitler's war...
...How do you find it...
...What with an absence of 45 years, painful but repressed memories and, last but not least, fierce air raids that had destroyed so much, why should I remember, or find, the streets or houses in which I had once lived...
...In response to mine, I heard an address by the Protestant theologian Martin Stoehr, containing some of the greatest, most relentlessly probing words I have ever heard from a Christian...
...I asked of my companion...
...The most absurd for the reason that made a cousin of mine ask me, "How can you study at a time like this...
...He began as follows: "In the nearly two thousand years that we have co-existed with Jews, we Christians have never once listened to them, and in this respect our Christian faith has not helped us...
...Now, on "our" side, it is a place for sightseers...
...Even to so great a Christian as Dietrich Bonhoeffer it does not seem to have occurred to meet with, let alone listen to, his fellow-Berliner, the great Rabbi Leo Baeck...
...In Jerusalem today an organ is out of place in a synagogue...
...Hundreds of black birds were sitting in the empty space...
...I continue to be moved as the service continues, but little by little my mood changes...
...Now der Tag has come and gone, and the ravens-and Russian communism-are in what was once the heart of Germany...
...Vaguely annoyed because the "good guys"-i.e...
...You have returned to help us to rebuild Germany...
...But I was sad at the same time...
...Real davvening, real prayer...
...And if there is a good deal of talking, especially during the Torah reading, I for one am not offended, though when I was a young purist I used to be...
...It was, and continues to be, the Fifth Avenu of Berlin...
...It was considered to have arrived when Nazi Germany launched its invasion of Russia-not coincidentally code-named Operation Barbarossa...
...In these brief years, Judaism in Germany underwent an e: traordinary renaissance to which far too little attention has been paid by historians or by anyone else...
...But you must promise me to return...
...Nothing but a small plate indicates to the passer-by on Pestalozzistrasse that here there is a synagogue...
...Then he said: "In all these years I have kept telling you, 'Do not leave, this Nazi disease will pass.' Now you must leave...
...Is Germany being rebuilt...
...You never know," she explained...
Vol. 10 • April 1985 • No. 4
