THE HAND REACHING into the open restaurant window is small and grimy. It is turned palm up. The little boy beggar can`t be more than 5 years old. A girl, 8, tops, hangs back a step, her eyebrows arched in a hungry question mark. Her smile is curious. Like me, she has wavy hair, dark eyes and dusky skin. We are on Kurfurstendamm, the swankest of West Berlin streets, and the other diners are porcelain compared to us.
”Get away, get away!”
The little girl flinches as something threatening whips the air. I turn to see the restaurant manager lunging toward our table and cracking a long wood switch. The veins in his nose throb with blue fury. Wisely, the boy and girl run, but their tiny Turkish faces stay with me. The image of the authoritarian German does too.
I am a Jew in Germany for the first time, and I have packed all the stereotypes for the trip. I am not expecting to have a good time. My traveling companion-a fair-skinned Christian with a convenient set of blue eyes-has chided me about presumptions that seem as fixed as my genetic makeup. I am prepared to hate the Germans. Something in my gut wants me to hate them. On my first night in West Berlin, the restaurant manager`s callousness makes it easier.
I know I should be ashamed. Bigotry is bigotry, even when it is aimed at ethnically pure Germans of the sort mislabeled ”Aryans” by the Nazis. But with East and West Germany reunited as one Germany, is it unfair to be wary or unwise not to be? Normally, I do not believe in collective guilt or national character. Now, my heart is telling me one thing, my head another, and this trip becomes for me an attempt at internal unification.
Along the way, I encounter other young American Jews experiencing the same dizzying swing of ambivalence. In the United States, we are not a devout bunch. None of us regularly attends temple, and few even bother to fast on Yom Kippur, the highest of Jewish holy days. During our summer holiday in Germany, religion defines us. We make pilgrimages to the bombed-out ruins of the old synagogue on East Berlin`s Oranienburger Strasse, now being transformed into a small Jewish center. One woman takes to wearing a Jewish star on her blouse.
Religion also separates us from them. My traveling companion, impatient with this sudden Judaic-Nazi obsession, asks when it will end, and I am stunned by the vehemence with which I snap back, ”When everyone old enough to have been a Nazi or vote for Hitler or just turn his head during the Holocaust is dead.”
On the quaint underground trains that crisscross Berlin, my every thought is an awkward cliche. An elderly gentleman offers his seat. I refuse, wondering behind a too-kind smile what exactly he did during the war. Defiant, I glare at everyone eyeing me. This is no overwrought imagination at work: A great number of Germans do stare.
Eventually, I concoct a theory. At 5 foot 4, I am, by German standards, puny. My nose and coloring are classically Semitic. I surmise that they must think I am Turkish, an oppressed and poor minority in Germany today. While I am out gawking at the outrageously expensive clothes in West Berlin store windows, a carload of Turkish men follows me for blocks, hurling compliments or maybe insults out the windows. In East Berlin a week later, a Turkish girl playing a baleful accordion for spare change cements my theory. ”Turk, Turk?” she whispers hopefully after me, hedging her hunch by using the German word, the same as in English.
”Ja, ja,” I lie.
The same day, my paranoia starts to dissipate. While never leaving me completely, it seems to be coming under control. I am a Jew. So what? They are German. Big deal! This becomes a mantra to repeat whenever a rude German waiter or brusque sales clerk fits my preconceptions. If I want Germans in general to be free of prejudice against Jews, one Jew in particular has to open her mind. That Jew is me.
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”TAKE MY WIFE, I COMMAND YOU,” GOES ONE GERman comic`s version of the Henny Youngman classic. He is poking fun at his homeland`s legendary love of official order. In the grainy films of brown-shirted, goose-stepping Nazi soldiers, their robotlike responses appear formidable and fearsome. Nearly a half-century later, their obsequiousness in daily life can border on the ludicrous.
Take the skinheads with the quadruple-pierced ears (please). In their black-on-black clothes, dangerously pointy boots and heavy-metal accessories, they fancy themselves the anarchists of the new Germany. Near midnight, I warily approach a group of the youths loitering on a corner. The street is deserted; no cars are coming. Then I notice that the traffic light is red. These hooligans aren`t looking for trouble. They`re waiting for the green. In an impulsive demonstration of criminal behavior, I sprint to the median while the red was still on and wave encouragement, but all five of them remain on the curb.
Germans are so law-abiding that the extensive subway can operate on the honor system and not go bankrupt. At many train stations, tickets are sold only in machines (about $1.60 for a two-hour pass). Riders punch their own tickets at the platform entrance. There are no turnstiles to jump or security guards to pass. There is a hefty fine for anyone who gets caught, but cheating would appear to be simple.
At first, the trains make me think ill of German deference to authority. Later I decide their subway system reflects badly on America. German trains are shiny-clean and relatively safe at all hours. There is little pushing or shoving and no blasting of boom boxes. Twice, German men, one in the East and another in the West, offer to carry my suitcase. Neither tries stealing it. When one mentions in flawless English that he has ridden the ”L” in Chicago, I shrug an apology and hope he has never seen underground New York.
But West German efficiency also can be disconcerting and, sometimes, intimidating. Workers go about their jobs politely, saying please and thank you, yet their eyes are often impersonal. ”Do you want to speak German, French, Spanish or English?” a young waitress in black tights, black midriff top and black hair from a bottle asks methodically. For all the crowds and all the beer they consume, West Berlin cafes are oddly quiet. Watching them enjoy themselves, I am reminded anew of the war. The patrons seem to pursue leisure with the same single-mindedness with which they battled the Allies.
In what was the GDR until October, the people are less sophisticated about their fun. There is nothing to buy and nowhere open to buy it anyway. Under law, shops close by 5 p.m. weekdays and all day Sunday in the West, but restaurants stay open. East Germans, who under communism stood to gain nothing personally by putting in long hours, still seem to go home whenever. Wernigerode, a Harz mountain village with medieval character, is bustling at midafternoon but empty well before sunset. Along with other weekend visitors, we circle the feudal castle that dominates a nearby hill, wondering how to get inside the fortress. It is 4 p.m.
”Nein. Nein. Nein,” a surly waitress says as we point to one item after another on the menu of a hotel restaurant off the main plaza. It is now 5:30 p.m. What the waitress does have left is veal, topped with ham, cheese and an egg. The vegetable is fried potatoes. I begin to think that if we are what we eat, we may not be the same as East Germans after all.
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THE SHOPGIRL, PUDGY FROM ADOlescence and too much red meat, comes around the counter and says something that sounds helpful. It is not any number to 100, a day of the week, a month, please, thank you or about the location of the bathroom. Embarrassed by my inability to respond, I stare at the floor. She looks down and up, down and up. She points, and I follow her finger: We are wearing almost identical clunky black shoes and white socks scrunched around our ankles.
East Germany has stood still for so long that the people`s clothes are back in fashion. Old women wear wedgy platform shoes and flowing skirts cinched at the waist or sleeveless shifts. Old men`s ties are wide, their trousers boxy and baggy. The young are more purposefully trendy. But unlike West Berliners, who can be intimidating in their up-to-the-moment vogueness, the effect in the East is awkward and uncertain.
The entire country, from the concrete blocks of East Berlin to the woodsy villages of Thuringia, reminds me of my grandmother`s apartment building. A vague, musty smell is pervasive. Everything appears frozen, as if the collapsed regime had declared it 1950 forever. The haze that hangs over cities and farmland is pollution, chugged out by immense factories that look strangely futuristic despite their backward environmental practices. But the sense created is of time suspended.
I feel comfortably alien in East Germany, just another foreigner come to see what has been off-limits since the Wall rose in 1961. Yet the time warp also forces me to confront the Jewish question from another perspective. These people did not even apologize for the Holocaust until this year. They were not offically encouraged to feel personal responsibility. No more than 500 practicing Jews are estimated to live here anymore. The country`s monuments to the war extol the fight against fascism without acknowledging that East Germans were among the fascists.
At the Buchenwald concentration camp, the gift-shop literature is infuriating in its refusal to acknowledge Jewish victimization. Granted, only a small number of prisoners who died in this camp were Jewish-about 600 out of 65,000. But the brochure demeans their deaths by saying that the stone marking the Jewish barracks ”is, as it were, a condemnation of every form of racism.”
For no particular reason, I inform the Buchenwald museum director that I am Jewish before asking why so few Jews died here. ”Oh,” he says helpfully, ”they sent your people to Auschwitz.”
I have to sit down in the heat. Settling on the flattened grass where the barracks once stood, I glance toward the crematorium, then beyond to roll-call square. Inscribed in the iron bars of the gatehouse are the words Jedem das Seine (Each to his own). My friend wonders aloud whether Buchenwald is haunted. Probably not, we decide. No one who worked here would ever want to return.
Or would they? Buchenwald, a labor camp that was a quarry and munitions factory, spreads across a vast parcel of land. Groups of visiting
schoolchildren press their faces against the windows of the detention cells, filled with gaudy wreaths and sepia-tone photographs of Soviet POWs murdered here. I hardly notice the youngsters. I am too busy calculating how old the dozens of gray-haired Germans would have been in 1940. Some of them had to have been 18, others 21 or more. What are these old men remembering when they walk the grounds? I struggle to dismiss the thought that this could be some sick class reunion-say, SS Guards 1944.
Buchenwald is tucked away in the forests surrounding Weimar, far enough for villagers to deny knowledge but near enough that they would have had to smell something or know something when the camp was open. My hostility reinvigorated, we head for town.
Right away, we stumble onto a Soviet military base, where thousands of soldiers have been stationed for decades. My friend teaches me to say ”Glory to the USSR” in Russian, and I rumble out of our rental car toward a trio of young men in uniform. They pose for a photo, fingers jutting into the air in the universal sign for peace.
”German?” one asks, and I shake my head a big no. I say my last name, so Russian-sounding in the United States, and wait for a reaction. Will it sound Jewish to them?
”Ah, American,” he says cheerfully. I notice that I am having a good time, against my will.
Now the only problem is where to spend the night. The stern woman bureaucrat at the Reiseburo der D.D.R. in East Berlin had warned that no one will let us stay in their homes without official permission. Apparently she is the only East German still minding the old rules. Everyone else is eager to assert their newly won independence.
At the Interhotel Elephant, a showpiece where Hitler once stayed, the clerk draws a map to the house of a man who oversees private room rentals. Without hesitation, the man invites us into his home. He has pages filled with the names of East Germans glad for the extra income. Currency unification is still days away, and we must pay in Deutschmarks, what he only half-jokingly calls ”real money.”
The room is wonderful. It costs $30 for two, and comes with a semiprivate bathroom and a most chatty hostess. Over breakfast, she gently reprimands us for coming in late the night before. ”Sleep well?” she asks while pouring thick coffee. ”Just short, huh!” For the next 30 minutes, she talks, in slow and loud German for our benefit, about her daughter in West Berlin, her husband who is nowhere in evidence and her tidy two-story townhouse filled with knickknacks. But she keeps steering the one-way conversation back to her favorite topic: the arrival of those West German marks.
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THOSE ALMIGHTY DEUTSCHMARKS come with a price: West German yuppies, who aren`t much different from the American variety except that they get their BMWs cheaper. East Germany is a tourist trap waiting to happen.
Now that the Wall is mostly paperweights, West Germans feel free to tool around the countryside, scouting underdeveloped towns to plunder. Renting a Trabant, a kiddie-sized car whose engine is about as powerful as a lawnmower, requires a week`s advance booking. On cross-country trains, passengers jam the aisles in second class. In the most popular towns, vacant hotel rooms are scarcer than lettuce.
Westerners, of course, have come to East Germany before. But never in anything approaching these numbers, tourism officials say, and never with such high expectations. No one expected communists to cater to them. Now enterprising capitalists are rushing to sell Old World charm for New World Deutschmarks. East Germans earn one-third the wages of their Western counterparts, and they do not appreciate being viewed as poor cousins.
”ALL I HEAR IS money, money, money,” complains Hans-Peter, a nuclear physicist, on the train to Dresden. He invites me to say with his wife and three young children, apologizing unnecessarily for the apartment`s smallness. ”Yes, I am happy for most changes. But I think not everything will be good.”
The isolation that communism imposed had the unintended benefit of preserving small towns and tiny villages midcentury. Only hours beyond East Berlin, with its hideous high-rises and choking traffic jams, the countryside exudes an innocence that may be impossible to retain under capitalism. Women in babushkas stoop in the fields, raking hay. Horse-drawn carts clatter down side roads, driven by barrel-chested men in white shirts and suspenders. Stone castle towers wink unexpectedly from hilltops.
It is impossible to wander around Weimar-which once boasted Bach, Goethe, Schiller and Liszt among its citizenry-without wondering what was so awful about life under communism. Some public buildings swoop and soar; the fronts of others are frosted like pastel cakes. But the outskirts of the city are as dreary as its center is dreamy. Ringing it are high-rises filled with matchbook-sized apartments, their white balconies gray with soot. And down the road, of course, stands Buchenwald to dull forever some of the shine of the East German jewel.
No matter where I go in Germany, East or West, the war and the camps keep coming back to me. ”We must never forget,” the teacher used to intone before my parents let me quit Sunday school. Selective recall is not an option on this trip. At least once a day, I remember vividly what I was not even alive to witness. The reactions are visceral, their intensity each time unexpected. In West Berlin, where our bombs left gaping architectural holes like missing teeth, an acquaintance comments on the shame of the damage. ”What?” I ask. ”We should have paved the place?” Both of us are Jewish, and we look at each other, equally appalled. Later, I see a couple with my kind of nose and coloring leaving a restaurant, and I spring after them. My hand is almost touching the man`s shoulder when I suddenly pull back. If they are not Jewish, will my question insult them? And why do I care that it might?
I am sorting all this through on the train to Czechoslovakia. We roll past high-rises, factories and farmers working green fields. The train is running ahead of schedule, unusual in East Germany, and the conductor who enters my first-class berth has a dour face and a curt tone. He is also in uniform. I hold a second-class ticket and want to upgrade to first class but don`t have the vocabulary to explain in German. Over and over, I repeat,
”Entschuldigen.” Excuse me. I shove all my Deutschmarks at him. He gestures for me to follow, and turns on his shiny heels. I think I hear them click, but maybe my imagination is working overtime again.
For five long minutes, we make our way toward the end of the train, through one car after another. My stomach is starting to hurt. Finally, we arrive at the canteen, where he makes change and hands it to me with a smirk. The conductor thanks me, which I do understand. Now my flush is from embarrassment.
Back in my berth, an older German fellow now seated next to me asks if I am all right. ”What a putz,” he says of the train conductor. My seatmate speaks good English. I tell him that the conductor is not so bad. For the next two hours, he tells me about himself, his family, his job. Hearing I am Jewish, he actually apologizes for the Holocaust. As the train rolls out of East Germany, we are sharing a simple lunch and laughing, and I forget to calculate his age in 1940.
