MICHAEL WVSCHOGROD

MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD The prospect of a reunified Germany has now become a realistic possibility, if not a certainty. This naturally arouses Jewish— not to speak of Polish and Russian— anxiety. I...

...Other than that, hundreds of people ate in silence...
...Far more important than the unrestored buildings was the totalitarian atmosphere of East Berlin...
...The postwar prosperity of West Berlin gave it an air of bohemian freedom very different from the Berlin of my childhood...
...We lived at Ora-nienburgerstrasse 33 in what is now East Berlin...
...During the worst years of Communist rule in East Germany, the only-institution that retained some measure of integrity was the East German Protestant Church...
...And this is true even though Nazi totalitarianism was far worse, I recognize, than its Communist imitation...
...I will not be surprised if a significant segment of the East German population is attracted to extreme right-wing parties, such as the Republikaner of West Germany...
...In June 1987, more than a thousand people crowded into his church to hear lectures about Jews and Judaism...
...I was born in Berlin...
...The reaction to Communism often results in a move toward the right, as Israel has learned from the Soviet Jewish immigration to that country...
...It is the same feeling we had in the Berlin of 1939...
...For decades, well into the seventies and even the eighties, the facades of many of the buildings showed the scars of the Batde of Berlin...
...But people did not speak to each other...
...Since then, I have visited Berlin many times...
...In the mid-sixties, I returned to Berlin for the first time, to determine the fate of my father's two sisters...
...In the spring of 1939 we emigrated...
...West Berlin was largely a rebuilt city with very little of the prewar city recognizable...
...For this and other reasons, West Berlin became the symbol of the new Germany...
...This was the Berlin I remembered from my childhood...
...The Nazi epoch did not truly end until the one-party system of Ulbricht and Honecker was terminated...
...For me, East Berlin has always been the real Berlin...
...I am convinced this decision was made in Moscow: The capital of Germany was to remain for a long time a reminder of the consequences of Nazi aggression...
...Pastor Yohannes Hildebrandt of the So-phienkirche in East Berlin was the leader of the Working Group of Jews and Christians in the German Democratic Republic...
...None of these visits has been easy...
...It was inadvisable to speak—or be overheard—in public...
...The place was packed...
...It was the city of my childhood memories...
...I cannot predict the future, but I do have memories...
...I am certainly not sad that the totalitarian regime of the German Democratic Republic has now come to an end, despite the fact that this raises the question of German reunification...
...The East German army goose-stepped...
...During those years, for a young East German to attend church on any regular basis almost always meant exclusion from higher education...
...the West German army never did...
...Whether Germany is reunified or not, however, it is in the interest of Israel and world Jewry to maintain a dialogue with whatever Germany or Ger-manies emerge...
...The stakes are simply too high to turn the other way...
...Because West Berlin remained, at least in theory, under four-power occupation, citizens of West Berlin were not subject to the draft, so West Berlin attracted many nonconformist young Germans who were eager to stay out of the West German army...
...East Berlin, however, was the Berlin I remembered...
...The feeling of being watched remains with me...
...This was reflected in coundess ways...
...The loudest sound was dishes being set on tables and then being collected...
...There was the cut of the uniforms of the Volkspolizei and the army, much closer to the Nazi uniforms than anything worn in West Germany...
...Then there was simply the overwhelming police presence in East Berlin...
...On one trip to East Berlin, my wife and I entered a huge restaurant for a bite of lunch...
...Long after Warsaw and Budapest had been rebuilt, the center of Berlin remained largely unrestored...
...It nurtured the young people who objected to the official militarism, the regime's lack of ecological concern and the deep corruption that permeated East German society...
...This was not an easy project to carry out in a country that was thoroughly anti-Israel and had refused to pay any reparations to Jews because it saw no continuity between itself and the preceding Nazi regime...
...But East Berlin retained much of the atmosphere of the Nazi Berlin I remembered...
...West Berlin exuded freedom, more so than any other German city...
...East Berlin was the real Berlin...
...I am convinced this decision was made in Moscow...
...Thousands of young people were willing to pay that price...
...East Berlin passed from Nazi to Soviet totalitarianism without interruption...
...And the East German Protestant Church also kept alive the memory of the Shoah with respect to the Jews...
...The center of the city was very litde changed...
...strangers were seated at the same table to accommodate everyone...
...It turned out they had taken their lives just before the deportation of Berlin's Jews started in the fall of 1941...
...Long after Warsaw and Budapest had been rebuilt, the center of Berlin remained largely unrestored...
...Every second or third block one would encounter a pair of policemen—they always came in pairs—who would be watching everyone and everything...
...Only in recent years could one observe significant improvements in the appearance of the city center...

Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2


 
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