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. 

Another Testimony About Israeli Experiences in Germany

The experiences of Shahak Shapira as a Jew/Israeli in Germany adds another testimony to the hardships and challenges of Jewish life in this country. As he landed in Laucha, in Saxony a province whose far-right sympathies are finally acknowledged on a wider scale, together with his younger brother and his mother, he only had the experience of the settlement of Oranit where he grew up.

However, through his family stories he was relatively aware of what to expect: his grandfather on his father side, Amitzur Shapira, was a victim of the terrorism attack during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. 

With a tone full of humour and sarcasm, Shapira accounts about his encounters with the 'brown' guys. Encounters not always innocents, as his brother will get to the court against one of them. Shahak himself is attacked by antisemites in Berlin this time on 2015 New Years' Eve. 

Unfortunately this is a reality for way too long: antisemitism in schools, extreme right as a reality of the everyday life in some parts of Germany, attacks against Jews. If the situation as such cannot be changed ovenight, at least documenting it will offer a proof that not everyone stayed idle and did nothing at all.

'Ben Salomo Means the Son of Peace'

'Du, Jude' is a depreciative word in German. I've heard it exchanged more between teenagers of different backgrounds in different parts of Berlin, including the high-end Western side neighbourhoods.

I am referring to a reality of the 2000s, the time when I started my German experiences, and also had enough language knowledge to grasp different nuances and jargon.

In his autobiographical book - in German - the Israeli-born rapper Ben Salomo - Jonathan Kalmanovich - witnesses his experience as he landed in Schöneberg's Berlin in the 1980s, as a small child. The dream of the perfect multicultural understanding was shattered once he entered the teenage years, as his football companions coming from different backgrounds started to ask THE QUESTION: 'Where are you coming from?'. The friendships suddenly turned into a fight - yes, that real physical fight - for survival. 

And the story goes on. He created the popular Rap am Mittwoch/Rap on Wednesday events where various hip-hop artists had the chance to play. Himself, he built up a musical brand focused on spreading understanding and peace - Ben Salomo means in Hebrew the 'son of peace' - and his songs are sharing stories about what does it mean to live in Germany, to be Jewish and how to take on religious belief - very light, bitte.

The hip-hop landscape in Germany is not race neutral and anti-semitism is often rampant and sometimes also rewarded. The popularity such rappers enjoy explain maybe why Jewish children are often beaten and bullied in German state school - and in private ones as well, as recently happened in the famous JFK. The fact that this situation is taking place for decades and only gets more visibility because of social media, doesn't change the fact that proper education and pro-active measures failed to be taken.

Who known, maybe rap can change something...