Effingers, a German Jewish Story

 

German-born Gabriele Tergit - born Elise Hirschmann - is a relatively new name for the German literary realm. Her multi-generational roman, Effingers, following a family story of a liberal Jewish family from the 19th century until the mid-20th was published only a couple of years ago.

The family base is in the fictional Kragsheim, but the book also offers an extensive historical and social panorama of Germany during those times, particularly Berlin, through the eyes of the Jewish characters. The book was written in German and finished in 1951. Tergit, the mother of the mathematician Ernst Robert Reifenberg, - whose name was given to a street in Berlin - was born in Germany but escaped the country via Palestine before reaching London where she settled.

Effingers is a very dense novel with many characters who are connecting in different circumstances. Their social mobility and modernity is reflected through their choices and new family connections built on the go. Tergit is a fine observer of the emerging social structures as well as of the Jewish society at the time. In addition to the rich nonfiction bibliography on this topic, the literary contribution is valuable for its authenticity and vicinity to the facts mentioned and the overall social realm. The writer is not only a creator of fictional words but indirectly a witness. 

For a compedium of European Jewish literature, Effingers is of particular importance as an unique - for me, at least - literary saga. A translation of the book into English or French would have offer to the non-German speakers access to an important source of literary testimony about Jewish everyday life in Germany before the Nazi destruction. 

The Strange World of The Passenger

 ´Be human!´

A Jew is on the run. He is called Otto Silbermann, has a decent amount of cash, a non-Jewish wife, a career of fighting on behalf of Germany during WWI, with a son in France with whom he is talking all the time, mostly asking him to secure an exit visa. He is robbed, told to be reasonable to understand those who don´t want to be seen talking with him. He is on the run, trying to escape to Belgium but turned back, taking a train to Berlin, another to Munich, maybe the next one to Hamburg.

The Passenger (originally published as Der Reisende) by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz is a utterly troubling intellectual experience. It is indeed a book of fiction, but the author was a witness of the infamous Kristallnacht and is inspired by the everyday interaction he witnesses. The feeling of being hunted and neglected, when not directly shamed and accused of being a Jew because born this way, on the most polite, condescending tone. That´s killing you; the polite tone of the neighbours pledging to ´please, don´t put it that way´, and understand that it´s ´against our will´ to behave differently. After all, they were in the party ´just like everyone else´. 

The writing is realistic, focused on the man on the run, Silbermann, who turned overnight into ´a swearword on 2 legs´. The ambiance, the characters he encounters and his attitude are the result of his situation. Thus, he doesn´t have too much time to reflect to his situation, he is aware of the pressure he has to cope with in order to escape. There is a crescendo of events reflected in the increased intensity of his feelings but it is the reader who is observing from afar all the changes. Silbermann, him, he has to run for his life.

Written when the author was himself on the run, The Passenger is becoming a bestseller more than eight decades after its conception. Once in a while, there are always books written by Jews or by authors who were against the Nazi regime are (re)published and are becoming suddenly the talk of everyone but by far this is one of my favorite ´discoveries´. Maybe because it sounds so close from home, so realistic thus frightening. 

I had access to the book in the audiobook format, lively narrated by Neil Hellegers. 

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. 

How to Desintegrate. To be Full Again

There is so much to say and write, on an intellectually critical note about how the Jewish life in Germany was set up but there are not too many intellectuals to create a critical mass against the mainstream.

On my side, I will mention one single event: it is the day when it takes place the so-called Long Night of Religions (Lange Nacht der Religionen). Once the year, usually somewhere at the end of the summer, for one night, the places of worships in Berlin are open to visitors. People come in large groups to visit various churches, mosques and synagogues. On one of those occasions, I was in the synagogue, for the end of Shabbat. Suddenly, a group entered the praying space, started to look around taking pictures (although they were told that Orthodox people on Shabbes don´t fancy such hobbies). They stayed longer for the seuda shlishit - the third required meal on Shabbat. Happy, they took another batch of people, observing how Jews are eating and singing and clapping their hands. They are alive, you see, let´s call it a day!   

Max Czollek belongs to a new generation of Berlin Jews. Born in Berlin at the end of the 1980s, he went through the full cycle of Jewish education. He doesn´t owe anything to anyone, in order to confirm his status as a Jew. He´s out of the everyday instrumentalisation of his identity for absolving the guilt of the majority. 

Desintegriert euch! is an honest account of the institutionalized game with memory on display in Germany, with Jews playing the main role according to a script which legitimizes the Leitkultur - dominant culture. It is a scenario which outlines what belongs and what not to Germany and where the Jews need to offer a ´perspective´ to the majority for excusing their historical excesses. For instance, let´s the Jews say their opinion on Luther´s antisemitism and call it a debate. 

There is a script for everything, but issued by the majority in order to push the minorities to conform. The Gedächtnis Theater - theatralisation of the commemorations - re-enacts the Shoa, among others, in a way which disconects the time slots. I´ve often heard young Germans complaining that ´enough is enough´ and it is about time to stop talking about the past, that past that ended up with the murder of 6 million people. Does AfD appear in a void? What about the neo-Nazis who are part of the everyday life for decades? My questions that owed me a dismissal.

But there is a lot more in the book and even a lot more to be said about how you are expected to think and behave as a Jew - and a non-German member of a minority group - in Germany. I am glad the circle of conformity is being broken. Itis about the time to take the floor.

I´ve had access to the book in audio format, read by the author.  

Rating: 5 stars

 

Learning to be Jewish in Germany

Dmitrij Belkin is one of the few of the so-called 'contingent' Jews who arrived in Germany following chancellor's Kohl decision to open the country to people of Jewish origin from Russia. Although the venerable leader of the Jewish community in Berlin Hans Galinski requested that only those who are halahically Jews - mother is Jewish - to be allowed, the political interest prevailed and in the end where accepted all those with a 'Jewish' heritage, which complicated at a great extent the overall distribution and identity of the newly created community.

Dmitrij Belkin arrived in the South of Germany from Ukraine as an adult, keen to continue his studies and learn - including German. Wandering from an absorption center to the other, meeting his new German neighbours or other people with migration background, Belkin is becoming aware not only of the new realities of the country he is about to become part of, but also of his Jewish identity. Actually, it is not the first time when I hear that someone is becoming more interested and focused on his own Jewish identity since living in Germany. It has to do not only with the memory of the Shoah, but with a certain Jewish reality that you cannot ignore and sooner or later, becoming part of this - even only intellectually - will happen. Even if you are an outsider, observing this reality means that there is a minimal interest for it and it may be enough for making a fire out of the sparke later. 

Ironically and self-ironically, engaged or just observing, Belkin is going through all the stages of becoming a public Jewish intellectual in Germany - including by doing his conversion to Judaism. He is taking note of the different Jewish communities in Frankfurt/Main or Berlin, is becoming involved in various projects and improves his German and academic credentials. He is part of the newly Jewish experiences in Germany and his full of humour memoir is really worth reading it if you want to better understand a different Jewish mentality and perspective.