I Sleep in Hitler's Room (40 page)

Why are German audiences coming to listen to Jewish music?

“For Germans, the interest in Jewish music is something like Disney.”

The musicians who perform Jewish music in Germany, he also tells me, are not Jews.

I guess I was a little naïve when I thought I’d find Jews here.

Why are they doing this?

“Compensation for the past. The history of Germany.”

Olaf goes on talking. He says he’s against the policies of Israel. “Building Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem is illegal.”

Again Israel?

Let me talk to another singer.

Conny, of Hamburg, is another Yiddishkeit musician. A violinist.

Jewish?

“In my last lifetime I was a Jew.”

Not in this one?

“No.”

But you are interested in the people who made this music?

She is.

I’m thinking: Daniel went to Nablus, maybe this Conny went to Tel Aviv.

Have you been to Israel as well? I ask her.

Conny is not amused. She gets upset. She’s offended by me. She seems to think that in some way, shape, or form I connect her to Israel. She raises her voice as she says, “I don’t have to go to Israel! My music has nothing to do with it! I don’t want to talk anymore!”

This outburst is strange to me. She’s out. I need more singers!

Ulla, a singer who hails from Wuppertal, comes to talk.

Are you Jewish?

“No.”

Why Jewish music?

“My father was very interested in Jewish history and he told me a lot about it. He was a soldier in the war and was taken prisoner in Russia.”

Are you a philo-Semite?

“It depends. In respect to how Israel treats Palestinians, definitely not.”

Palestinians again! What the heck is going on in this Germany?!

I am really getting lost here. But she’s not.

“My ex-husband is an Arab from Jordan,” she tells me. Then, with a warning, she adds: “I miss German Jews.”

You what?

“Since 1820, Jewish and German cultures have been intertwined. The most famous German writer of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine, was Jewish. What is socialism without Karl Marx? And his grandfather was a rabbi. Psychology: Sigmund Freud. A Jew.”

He was Austrian, wasn’t he?

“That’s all German culture. You can’t divide it.

“Stefan Zweig. A Jew.

“German cabaret: It wouldn’t exist if not for the Jews.

“All famous German sociologists were Jewish. And they immigrated to the United States.

But I’m against the Israelis building a wall. That’s like in Berlin before unification. There are a lot of Palestinian people who are very, very peaceful. I don’t want the Jews to make the same mistakes we Germans did during the war.”

Yes. Israel is famous for building zoos next to crematoriums, where Palestinians are routinely gassed.

Christiane, a Klezmer singer, native of Hannover, tells me her story.

“My grandma was very pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. She was religious, Baptist, and she introduced Israeli music to me.”

Are you as religious as her?

“Not anymore.”

Still pro-Israel?

“Yes and no. I support the right of Jews to a land but I am against the politics—”

As I write, she checks my iPad, and she stops me. She’s really annoyed:

“No, not ‘support’ and ‘against.’ I don’t like this! I am a skeptic. I think Israelis are paranoid. They want to solve all their problems alone—”

You seem to be very emotional about this issue. Why?

“Yes, I am. Because you will call me an anti-Semite.”

Me? Why do you think that?

“Because when we criticize Israel, we are immediately labeled anti-Semites! When Germans say anything about—”

Only Germans? What happens if the French say—

“The French too!”

Then why did you use the word “Germans”?

I have no clue what she says from this point on. She keeps on talking about Israelis and Palestinians and Gaza, and all I want to do is take the next plane to Gaza and leave all Germans alone. Really; I’ve had it up to my skull. My initial instinct to go to Gaza, as I see clearly now, was right. I’d have had much more fun there.

But I say nothing to her. I just sit. And listen. Try to interject here and there, but I’m not really into it.

I think to myself.

I remember a while ago when a German actor said to me, “What we did to the Jews in World War II is horrible, those Jews were very nice and we should have never sent them to Auschwitz. But the Jews today? All of you, to Auschwitz!”

I smile. I don’t know if that actor meant it as a joke or if he was serious. But I laughed.

The people here, the singers and the musicians of Yiddish memory, fit that description pretty well. They celebrate the dead Jews but are one-minded in their criticism of living Jews. For whatever reason, they seem to think that this planet will be paradise if only the Israelis were less aggressive.

I wish they were right. Sadly, they’re not. For even if Israel is guilty of every crime it’s accused of, a man must be either totally naïve or extremely anti-Semitic to think that the root of humanity’s misfortunes lies with that tiny state.

So unlucky are the Jews that even those who celebrate their culture are certified idiots and incurable racists.

I need a zoo. A zoo, with a couple of brown bears, would be really nice now.

It’s late at night. I sit by myself next to the Weimar Rathaus. Young Germans are walking by. Some of them are so beautiful! But I don’t want to start a conversation with any of them. It’s after two in the morning and I don’t want to have nightmares.

A thought comes to me: The Germans, and sorry for generalizing, will do everything and anything to look good, to appear beautiful, to sound smart. But who are they, really? They are the most narcissistic nation on the planet. They think the world of themselves, and they want everyone to agree with them.

They do their stupid theater, breaking the most beautiful plays into pieces, because they think that this way they’ll look “high culture.” They are against Israel because they think that by being so they can create an image of themselves as “human-rights lovers.” If some Brits are against Israel, the Germans would like to be even more anti. It’ll look better. And if they lose an eye in the process, like Daniel, so be it. They will go on, because they want to look good. Peace lovers. Like Gitti. Like WDR. The Germans care about the Palestinians as much as they care about the Iranians. Nada. Ziltch. But they do beautiful designs, the Germans, because they want so desperately to look nice. And they are geniuses at this, no question. More than any other nation in the world, the Germans concentrate deeply on visual beauty—and they get results. But they don’t stop there. Subconsciously the Germans think that if they occupy themselves with the Palestinians of Gaza they will erase from memory the Brown Bears of Buchenwald—and will look beautiful in the eyes of the world.

Germany is one of the richest countries on the planet, but they complain as if it were the poorest. Better is not enough, best is not enough; they want more. Always more. They are anti-Semitic and supremacist to the core of their being, but they cover it with huge masks, declarations of love and public hugging of the other. Any issue that seems hip, they immediately jump on the bandwagon and go for the ride. They want to look cool. They love to give those huge introductions before they give an answer to any question you ask them, because they have no clue to any real answer but still want to look brainy. They love brainy. They are, in short, the most self-deluded and self-righteous people in the world.

These thoughts make me feel very bad. Because somewhere inside me, buried deep in my very being, I love the Germans.

Let me go and sleep, dream of nice.

Tomorrow will be a great day.

Sleep well, Gaza.

G’night. I’m in bed. Hi Adolfy, can you hear me? You have a nice bed. I like it.

The first Nazi ministers in history were installed in Weimar in 1930, a woman tells me the next day. And the first
Parteitag
(party congress), after the refounding of the party, took place in Weimar. That was in July of 1926.

Enough. Really. I want to have a day without Jews, Nazis, or Palestinians. Germany. I want Germany! Just that, pure and simple.

Anja, who works for the tourist information office, drives me to Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, to witness firsthand Werner Tübke’s monumental work. Anja was born in the east of Germany, she knew the GDR firsthand, and she’s happy the Wall came tumbling down.

What was your first impression of the West?

“I went to the supermarket and couldn’t understand it: Why do you need twenty different kinds of mustard?”

That’s it?

“I went to McDonald’s and I couldn’t stand the smell. Smell of unnatural food. And what a terrible taste! To this day I can’t eat there!”

Anja has many stories to tell, I am sure, but we have arrived at Werner’s
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany
. This is an amazing work, 14 x 123 m in size, and since it’s a rotunda painting it has no beginning and no end. It’s divided into the seasons of the year, with background colors indicating an approximate time of year, but you can start and finish at any part of the painting you wish. The GDR commissioned the artist to paint the German Peasants’ War of 1525, which was fought for freedom from feudal lords. But Werner went beyond a depiction of the literal scene. In his painting he presents the tales of the rich and the poor, of justice and lawlessness, and he draws heavily on biblical stories, taken from both the Old and the New Testaments. And so he opened his world to a wider audience.

The painting can give you nightmares. Its practical message, summed up, is this: There are bad people out there, and always will be, no matter what you do. This is disturbing, even if true. Still, it doesn’t detract from the beauty of the piece.

This museum was designed to be a one-painting museum, a museum dedicated to only one picture. And I am told that this is how it was in the GDR. That's what it was designed to be, but that's not what it is now. Today in the halls leading to Werner’s work are many other paintings. Here is one of a person wearing the yellow patch. Yes, that famous “Jude” of the Nazi era.

How did the Jew sneak in
here
!

I’m leaving. I go back to Weimar, say goodbye to Hitler, Schiller, Goethe, and mount the train to Leipzig.

In Leipzig I meet Birgit, a funny creature. She asks if I want to visit the American embassy. Why would I? Well, she says, “it’s just across the street.” I look and can’t see it. The only thing to my back is McDonald’s.

Yeah. How stupid I am! That’s the “American embassy”!

Brigit cried when the Wall fell, she tells me. She crossed west, and she bought a banana.

A banana?

“In the GDR we had bananas only at Christmas.”

Brigit has something to say, she wants to share what’s in her heart. She talks as we walk: “West Germans stole from us. After the Wall fell, they crossed the border, our sisters and brothers, and stole from us. They sold us garbage, and charged for it. They bought factories from the government, for as cheap as one deutsche mark, because they promised the government they would develop the area. They didn’t. They closed down the factories, sold the parts, tools, and land and created high unemployment. People don’t know. Look here, here’s a memorial for Felix Mendelssohn. He was Christian, but the Jews think he’s a Jew. Israeli tourists told me that a Jew is always a Jew, no matter what.”

Birgit is in a relationship with a foreigner, an English man, who calls her a Nazi on occasion. But Brigit is a nice lady. She supports Human Rights Watch. And she stopped smoking when the German government raised the tax on cigarettes.

“They raised the tax because they needed money for the war in Afghanistan. I am not supporting that war!”

Once Brigit departs, I go to see Tobias Hollitzer, director of the Museum in der Runden Ecke, the Stasi Museum, a museum housed at the former Stasi headquargters. He tells me that “probably every second citizen had a file in the Stasi.”

At the time, Tobias belonged to an environmental group. It wrote a report about the environmental risks, for example, of emissions from factories. The Stasi file suggests that the report was written for the purpose of challenging the authorities. Then, in a paragraph at the bottom of the page, the Stasi author of the file notes that the report is wrong. Reason? The actual risks to the environment were much higher . . .

This is funny. I love it!

On the next day I sit down for a talk with the Reverend Christian Führer, one of the leading personalities behind Leipzig’s famous
Montagsdemonstrationen
(Monday Demonstrations), in and around St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig, that started in 1989.

Does he believe that the demonstrations brought down the GDR?

“Yes. And the church did it, did the right thing.”

And ever since those days he dedicates himself to spreading the message of
Keine Gewalt
(literally, “small power,” or nonviolence and peaceful revolution) the world over.

Does he think that, after all these years,
Keine Gewalt
demos can change policies, regimes?

“Yes. We did it!”

Let me understand: Twelve years of the Reich. How come this system didn’t work then?

“People were executed.”

Does it mean that peaceful revolution works only against weak regimes?

“No. The message of Jesus worked here even though the GDR was a powerful regime.”

If the Nazis come to power in Germany again, let’s say tomorrow, will a
Keine Gewalt
demo help?

“No.”

Adolf, obviously, is stronger than Jesus.

I walk through the streets of Leipzig, away from the touristy center, and find them appealing. Here’s a store called Licht Design. An item in the window: A Leipziger traffic light, turned red, and around it, in English: “Don’t stop now!” It’s really cute, I like it. A few feet later, a sign on the wall: “Sorry. We are open.” Sweet.