Germany: Ambivalence Amid Plenty

“Without Jews, there is no German identity,” writes the West German historian Michael Wolffsohn, “without the Germans, no Jewish one.” One of the paradoxical results of the Holocaust is that Jews and Germans are forever tied to each other in linkages in which guilt, recrimination, memory and forgetfulness convulse and contend.

For most of the Jews who survived the concentration camps of Europe — as well as for many who lived abroad — the solution to trauma was distance from Germany and things German. How could they live and work in a country that had sought their very destruction? How could they allow themselves and their children to be German when that word had become their very antithesis?

Yet Jews remain in Germany today. Their number is minuscule, their presence barely visible — certainly nothing like the vibrant and bustling pre-Hitler communities centered in Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities that accounted for nearly 1% of the population before 1933. Those who have chosen to live in Germany explain their presence in several ways: a continuing sense of a shared culture, a mission to prod German conscience and memory, and business opportunities.

Most Jews residing in Germany are refugees or emigres from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, who see life in West Berlin and the Federal Republic as a vast improvement over their previous existence. Many are baffled that anyone should think their presence worthy of comment. “Living as a Jew in Germany is , just like living in America,” says Alex Kozulin, 31, a Russian-born pianist who came to West Berlin via Israel twelve years ago. “I don’t feel I have any enemies.” Heiner Ulmer, 40, the son of Polish concentration-camp survivors who settled in Bamberg after the war, is more emphatic. Says the high school teacher: “I’m a German. I was born here, I studied here, all my friends are German.”

Jews who lived in Germany before the war form a minority of the 28,000 who make the Federal Republic their home. One of them is Alfred Moses, 70, a semi- retired West Berlin watchmaker who left Europe for Israel in late 1948 after living through the horror of the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Finding life in the Middle East intolerable, he and his wife Inge returned to Germany in 1954. In Berlin the couple’s friends are all Christians. Says Inge: “We do not go to synagogue, and there are few Jews, if any, in our neighborhood.” She adds, “We’re treated normally, and we can live like other people.”

Living a pleasant life, however, does not erase ambivalence about the past. The Moseses, for example, are concerned that Germans gloss over guilt for the Hitler years and the Holocaust by focusing on their own suffering during World War II. The feeling transcends the generations. Says Ariel Karmeli, 25, born in Frankfurt to Jewish parents hailing from Syria and Iran: “My culture is German. Frankfurt is my city. Germany is my country. But here I must constantly justify myself to others. When I get on a bus and see an old man, I ask myself, ‘What did he do in World War II?’ If he knew I was a Jew, what would he do now?” Convinced that Jews cannot live normal lives in Germany, Karmeli has decided to emigrate to Israel. Says his friend Deni Kranz, 25, born in Cologne to Israeli parents: “Here you are exotic as a Jew, like the way mangoes are exotic to East Germans. I am a mango here.”

When the war ended, Ralph Giordano, the son of a Sicilian musician and a German-Jewish woman, debated whether he should stay in Hamburg. The humiliations suffered during the Hitler years were fresh in his mind. He had been dismissed from an elite school because of his background; his father had lost his job for refusing to divorce his wife. But Giordano decided to stay. He loves the language, he says, the culture, the country. He wanted to be part of cleansing Germany of residues of Nazism. “If I had gone away,” he explains, “be it to the antipodes, I would still be on earth. And then I | would have learned about the continued existence of National Socialist thinking in this country. It would have been intolerable for me not to have at least tried to combat it.”

An acclaimed author, Giordano has spent his life waging war on what he calls Germany’s “second guilt,” the subconscious denial of responsibility for the Holocaust. Others share that mission. Says Kranz: “I have an obligation to discuss the Holocaust and the future with Germans, non-Jewish friends and the press. I want to go to bed at night with a clear conscience.”

Werner Bergmann, a researcher at the Center for Research into Anti-Semitism, estimates that 5% of Germans are hard-core anti-Semites. “Anti-Semitism,” he says, “is roughly as prevalent in West Germany as it is in other Western European countries.” Heinz Galinski, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews, the umbrella group of all Jewish congregations in West Germany, agrees. Says he: “We’ve always had anti-Semitism here. But we cannot say that it has increased in recent months or years.”

History makes every anti-Semitic incident resound more in Germany than perhaps anywhere else. In Frankfurt a year ago, the windows of a Jewish school were shattered by a bomb. A girl from Frankfurt remembers her father being called a Saujude (Jewish pig) at a football match. Jews were appalled at the insensitivity of those who wanted to designate Nov. 9 as a holiday marking the fall of the Berlin Wall; that date is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the violent outburst in 1938 that launched the Nazis’ all-out campaign against Jews.

Prejudice may grow with unification because antiforeign sentiment has surged visibly in East Germany. During the March election campaign in the G.D.R., small groups of ultra-right demonstrators sometimes supplemented the cries of “One German Fatherland!” with “Germany for the Germans! Out with the foreigners!” and “Jude verrecke!” — “Drop dead, Jew!” Says Irene Runge, a Jewish professor of cultural anthropology at East Berlin’s Humboldt University: “Never for a moment do I forget that I am in Germany.”

Under the cloak of calling itself an antifascist state, East Germany would not acknowledge responsibility for the crimes of the Hitler period until the Volkskammer did so April 12. The years of silence may have stunted public awareness of the issue and, coupled with the unpopularity of the ousted Communist regime, have led to fears that the old Nazi caricature of “Jewish Bolsheviks” may be revived.

East German politicians of Jewish descent have been assailed during demonstrations, among them Gregor Gysi, chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the Communist Party. GYSI IS NOT A GERMAN! and OUT WITH THE JEW GYSI! read some banners at one rally. Earlier this year, vandals defaced the grave of the playwright Bertolt Brecht with graffiti that read JEWISH PIG and OUT WITH THE JEWS. Brecht was a Marxist, though not a Jew. Says Michael Czollek of the Jewish Cultural Union in East Berlin: “That attack is evidence of an anti-Semitism that considers anything that’s seen to be somehow un-German to be Jewish.”

Until 1933, Jews could be unequivocal about being German. Says Michel Friedman, 34, a Frankfurt lawyer: “Jews were so convinced that they were part of Germany that they failed to see the danger signs.” Today they live in a country with two geographies — one a visible landscape of prosperity; the other a terrain traversed by way of a metaphysical atlas that lies embedded in memory. Obstacles protrude, preventing a seamless match with the world as others see it. While no one expects the terrors of the past to be repeated, the scars are present. Yet some see signs of renewal, of a sense of place, of belonging. Living in two worlds, they look for reconciliation.