About Lies

Anyone with an ounce of observation skills, interested to take the pulse of the daily life on the streets of Berlin may have notice that in the last two years a different mood is growing. Yeah, Berlin remains a party city and people love to dance on the street, but this time they do it in the monotonous pace of screams to ´globalize the Intifada!´ I give the benefit of doubt that many of those in trance when hearing it were not even born during the time of the Intifada, and some really don´t have anything to do with the Middle East - except some T-shirt they got for free with the bold Palestine word on their chest - preferably red. But there are many who actually know it very well, and they may fantasize about playing its game. Those who may produce the T-shirts and may hand some financial support to those in need, laying idly near the Shisha bars of Neukölln. 

Jüdische Allgemeine editor-in-chief Philipp Peyman Engel wrote recently a book about Germany´s Existential Lies - Deutsche Lebenslüge in original, the English version of the translation belongs to me - which sums up facts and figures, experiences shared and lived. In Berlin, in Israel, in Ruhrgebiet - where he was born. Experiences from his mother´s country of birth, Iran.

I don´t think this book is for the German Jews, they may know and see by themselves, no matter how distant from the daily practice may be. But the Germans themselves, they may want to read about the duplicity - those...´yes...but´ just for the sake of playing right while hiding the truth (it is just me or the practice of taroof is taking too much over our public lives, no matter where - hint, see the current ceasefire between Iran´s mullahs and Israel). 

Instead of creating a debate, a dispute, some truths on the table, due to some cacophonic screams that will make the most aggressive bazaari hide of shame - bazaari people are lovely and hardworkers, don´t take me wrong - that diverted the discussion into a direction that really do not matter for the discussion - if Payman Engel´s mother was or was not member of Baha´i when for most of the people heating the debate this name says much less than a Mai Tai they order to drown their existential self-doubts - we may be skipping the chore of the book. Is that true? Is life for Jews in Germany becoming more threatening after 7th of October? Is it fair to expect the Jewish citizens of Germany to enjoy life or only if you screem ´Free, Free´ waving the flag of a country murdering its own citizens you have the right to breath without fear?

What about reading the book, taking notes, create some bullet points, read some history books or hire some people to do it for you, bring your friends from all over the river and seas and discuss. Use arguments, examples, counter-argument, you name it. Instead, we are missing another occasion of self-reflection and all we are left with are the loud screams of mediocrity.  

Feeling a Stranger in your Own Country

 

Yascha Mounk was born in Germany in a culturally Jewish family originary from Poland. The official Polish antisemitism within the Communist Party at the end of the 1950s, forced his family to leave Poland and spread all over the world. Belonging to a post-war generation born Jewish but raised Communist and Polish, his family set in Germany, besides the heavy weight of the recent past, because they wanted a professional future. As many immigrants in Germany, they learned the language and contributed to the larger German society.

Yascha Mounk was born here, speaks German with an accent and is vaguely - if ever - involved in the institutional Jewish life. From the legal point of view, Germany is indeed his country, but a country where he does not feel at home and never did. Nowadays an American citizen, he lives and teaches political sciences in New York City.

Stranger in my Own Country belongs to a recent trend of memoirs written by young Jews living in Germany who are brutally coming at terms with their identity, which can also mean rejecting dramatically the society that never wanted them. 

There are a couple of aspects involved by this process.

On one side, is the nauseating philosemitism which is as pathetic as lacking any substance. It´s a mental automatism, a tic, which in fact does not say anything - good - about how the Germans really feel officially about Jews. Usually expressed in the presence of someone declaring his or her Jewish identity, this attitude does not mean anything but a political statement, empty of a practical meaning. It is just a reflex, not a constant state of mind, and its clearer reflection is the attitude towards refugees. ´In fact, while ordinary Germans now have a multifaceted contradictory attitude towards Jews, many of them express hostility against other kinds of immigrants and foreigners with larger integration issue´. 

On the other side, there is the frontal antisemitism which never actually left - Europe, or Germany and what was latest heard on the streets of Berlin, London or Milan, to name only a few is one of the many proofs in this respect. 

Caught between those extreme attitude, Mounk, as many other Jews living here, born or only immigrants, could not feel at home. Do not have any real reason to consider Germany their home. The wall between they and them and the others and in the end, between humans as such, are becoming higher and higher. A self protection against each other.

The book explains the post-WWII German history - from the West Germany perspective - through facts and historical details. The slow development of the Jewish communities in Germany are explained in the same time with the different incidents and the shift in the field of the mentalities, particularly acknowledging the past in all its complexity and especially context. ´A younger generation of intellectuals, in short, has become willing to talk about the German victims of WWII without feeling the need to put their ancestors´ suffering into context´. A kind of YOLO interpretation of history which irony put aside, is wrong in its simplicity. 

Stranger in my own country is the unhappy ending for an identity search. Actually an identity which is refused for all the wrong reasons. But we are living in a fluid world and identities can be replaced, embelished and re-created. I am glad that in the last ten years so many memoirs written by young German Jews were written. Although the tone is sad and disappointed, those testimonies can create a space for open discussion and, who knows, maybe a medium- and long-term change at the level of mentalities.

The Dangerous Terror against Jews, in Germany

 

The murderous antisemitic terrorist attack against the synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019, in the holiest day of Yom Kippur outraged many people, but for many different reasons. Some - locals, politicians and everyday people probably - because they were reminded of a fact that this time went out of any control. Many, on both sides knew that the incident was just one of the many in a long line of events that were perpetrated every single year since 1945, more than once, all over Germany - be it federal or communist.

Ronen Steinke, German journalist by Süddeutsche Zeitung, collected all those facts and figures about attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions perpetrated continuously since 1945. In Terror gegen Juden, this chapter has 89 pages and it ends the book but I was too curious to wait until the end and went a couple of times through all of the incidents. I knew a couple of them, but I was reading about some of them for the first time. My personal experience is not relevant anyway as I´ve spent a bit over a decade here, but think about people having to deal on a daily basis since their birth with a situation that, as the very well documented shows, it actually never changed. The only new aspect is that to the old right and left anti-semitism - with representatives of both wings getting their stages of terrorist training in Palestinian camps in Lebanon or Jordan - is that in the last 10 years or so, there is added a new threat coming from extreme Islamists. Most probably this last development is convenient for those trying to convince the larger public that the refugees brought antisemitism and increased the number of attacks against Jews. In fact, vandalized cemeteries, synagogues on fire, Jewish lives being lost to terrorist attacks were a reality long before that traumatic event. 

The mixture of people who are hating to death Jews in Germany is bizarre, colourful and always toxic. From the communitarian idealists, to eco-fascists, pure neo Nazis - including among the police forces - and Islamists. Those marching and shouting Al Quds events were in fact saying loud what many everyday Germans may strongly believe. The reluctance of taking a firm stance against the BDS movement is based on the fact that actually there is a good slice of the German population which supports the ideas expressed by that movement. 

The book doesn´t address particularly the situation in the communist Germany other than by mentioning the frequent cases of cemetery desecrations, but it does not mean that it was much better, as both the German communists and their STASI allies purposely assumed. The fact that so many right wing ´identitary´ movements are currently nested in Eastern part of the country shows that, no matter where one may look within Germany, the so-called de-nazification - both institutionally and at the level of mentalities - was never a political priority and therefore never fully achieved.

What Ronen Steinke outlines in his book, based on facts and legal realities, is that too little have been done for approaching in a coherent way this constant phenomenon of the post-war Germany. Among which the inconsistent, if any, support of the state for an outstanding security concept of Jewish institutions and synagogues, as well as the lack of a coherent legal approach of attacks aimed at Jews - including the lack of a proper legal definition of antisemitism. 

The book is more than a random reading about post-war antisemitism, but it includes a couple of useful suggestions that I wish to live long enough to see them accomplished at the institutional level, among which harder punishments for antisemitic attacks and hate crimes in general, de-neo-nazification of the police - I dare to say that not only the police is sharing such mindsets, and this is not only the case of Germany -  a legal argumentation of the judiciary that does not offer such a generous space of expression and manifestation to antisemitic perpetrators and last but not least a higher security for the Jewish institutions - educational, religious, social. 

There is so much to say and write on this topic. Way too much. But it´s fantastic to notice a new generation of Jewish writers and scholars and journalists who are not giving up, no matter the reason. 

Winternähe - About Jewish Identity in the German Lands

When it comes to Jewish identity in Germany, I've often read about a lot of topics, all interested but not necessarily relevant for my interests. Many young promising writers lately published their memoirs or novels, in German, about their experiences of being Russian Jewish or mostly from the former communist countries and facing a completely new country with its rules, new language and local communities reluctant to welcome to warmheartly the new comers. 

However, I've been always curious about the experience of local Jews of growing up and living in Germany, not only after the war but especially in the last decades of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. I personally know one person that might have some stories to tell but I completely abhor so I better look finding for honest and interesting people. 

I've first heard and seen Mirna Funk a couple of years ago, at a discussion at the Jewish Museum in Berlin dedicated to Israeli-German relations, literature and identity that although it was a bit too leftist in essence, brought interesting topics expressed by young writers and intellectuals. Her book, Winternähe, was not ready yet but the dialogue I've witnessed then made me curious enough to buy the book shortly after publication. 

I will not enter now into the - very important though - halachic debate about how is a Jew, and how the Jews in Germany define themselves. The book has also many autobiographical insertions, at least as I take into account the various public statements by the author herself. The character of the book, Lola grew up in the former communist Germany, with a Jewish father who run away from her and his country as far as from Australia. Her German mother wasn't too family bound either so she lived with her paternal grandparents. In the new, democratic, reunited Germany she is making a life of her own, trying to define herself, in a different way than other people - both Jews and non-Jews - want to define her. She is genuine, a bit chaotic, financially independent to run away from Berlin to Israel - during the latest war - and then to Thailand. She needs to settle to a herself she is not aware how to find it, where to find it and how to clearly define in a readable way for the other people - noth Jews and non-Jews - too. Her ideas and her context are sometimes highly stereotypical, but this is the feeling I've had often when I've tried to delve more into the local Jewish approach. When you go beyond the overall accepted culture of rememberance there is nothing clear to expect and most probably anything good either when it comes to Jewish perception and identity. 

Besides the actuality of the topics raised I also liked the style - I've read the book in the original German language - and the character construction. I only wish I'll discover more genuine German authors writing about as many relevant Jewish questions and issues as Mirna Funk.

Rating: 4 stars