I’m Jewish. I’m German. I’m Jewish and German.
I was born behind the Berlin Wall, in East Berlin, and grew up without a religion and without a national identity. I was baptized in 1964, but only to provide a reason for my great-grandmother in West Berlin to get a visa so she could see the family for the first time since the Berlin Wall was built. Otherwise, my mother and grandmother would only enter a church to look at the artwork or listen to an organ concert.
In fact, I knew very little of the actual dimension and impact of the Nazi mass-murder of European Jewry, nor of the world’s deep and lingering animosity toward Germans. I learned the truth only as a teenager, from an American TV show and, ironically, from a black-market copy of “Fear of Flying.”
For the four decades during which East Germany lived under domination from the Soviet Union, Communist Party members who believed in the system practiced a substitute religion. My own family, by contrast, was dominated by feelings of disappointment and helplessness. We didn’t believe in anything. Our only sense of belonging was to one another.
Official Communist Party history taught the Third Reich years as a story of communist resistance to Nazi fascism. In my school books the only martyrs, heroes and victims of the Nazi years were communists. The murder of six million Jews was merely a side issue. I remember how a high school classmate once told me that his grandfather had perished in a concentration camp.
“Oh,” I said, “he was a communist.”
When he told me his grandfather was Jewish, I was baffled.
Awareness came from two unusual sources. The first was the broadcast of the American TV series “Holocaust” on West German television in the late ’70s when I was still a teenager.
What had been suppressed for more than 30 years was now spoken and argued and fought about. Parents and grandparents became subject to uncomfortable questions from the postwar offspring, and thousands of film documentaries, features and articles followed. This influenced the East as well, and in 1983 a comprehensive book on the “Final Solution” was published there.
The second was the first book I read in English, a smuggled paperback copy of Erica Jong’s erotic “Fear of Flying.”
It was not Isadora’s uninhibited private life that shocked me but the way she looked at Germany and the Germans while living in Heidelberg where her husband was stationed with the U.S. Army.
Her view of Germany was as clear as it was surprising to me: Every German was responsible for World War II and the Holocaust, and every German who had been an adult by the end of the war was a potential murderer.
All of a sudden I looked at my own grandparents in a different way because I realized Jong was talking about them, and I looked at myself because it could have been me had I been born a few decades earlier.
The attempt to understand led me to an interest in anything Jewish or to do with Jews. And it happened that I soon met some American students visiting East Berlin who were Jewish, and they asked me for the way to an old synagogue. I went with them, and I also took them to a cemetery where we looked for the names of relatives.
In the spring of 1992, after the fall of East German communism, I came to the United States and took part in a project of a Pennsylvania university co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. It brought 10 young East German professionals here for lectures, seminars, synagogue visits and meetings. During the day we learned about the development of Jewish thought and the history of Christian-Jewish relations, and in the evenings we met people.
The seminar added a new dimension to my interest in Jewish matters: religion. I was intrigued by Judaism because it encouraged not doctrine but questioning, discussion and learning. Having lived in a dictatorship, I could connect strongly with the idea of freedom taught by Passover. Having experienced foreign rule from Russia, the war for liberation celebrated by Hanukkah had a lot of meaning too.
One night an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor hugged me and told me, with tears in her eyes: “Now I know. There are good Germans too.” Another day, at a reception following Sabbath services in rural Pennsylvania, the rabbi’s wife, barely older than I, exploded and screamed at us: “I want you to feel guilty, I want you to feel bad, every day and every night!”
At this moment, and maybe for the first time, I realized that I was, indeed, German, just because others saw me as such. I felt the stigma, and I felt helpless.
It was only after a visit to Israel that I was encouraged again. I felt very happy and at home there. I met Israelis of my generation. They never saw or treated me as a German but as the person I was.
For them, perhaps, there was no need to emphasize their being Jewish — and different from me — because almost everybody around them was Jewish too.
At about the same time I met my husband-to-be, an American who was then working as a journalist in Berlin. Looking back at the chain of events, I am almost tempted to say that it could not have been a coincidence that he was Jewish. But even between us, the German-Jewish issue was very hard to deal with for a long time.
It was only when we became engaged that the problem was solved almost automatically. Thinking about a future family, I was sure that I wanted our marriage and our children to be Jewish.
I converted last spring. I have not only come to accept my being German, I have even realized that there are values in German culture that I cherish and uphold. Yet when I look back there seems to be a strong inner logic to my path to Judaism, and it is hard for me to think that once I was not Jewish.
