LETTER FROM GERMANY TODAY

I

Berlin looks exactly as I thought it would. From the car that is to take us to our hotel all I can see are wide, swerving freeways flanked by giant cranes and bleak, tall buildings that recall the outskirts of any Central European city in perpetual reconstruction. It’s my first time here, but nothing seems to surprise me, not the color of the city, not the chill, uninviting drabness of this midwinter day nor the dutiful obedience with which cars race through the city but halt at the first red light to let equally dutiful pedestrians cross. One by one, the cliches fall into place. Everyone’s heard of German precision and of the steel-gray accuracy of its motors, its work force, its mind-set. Massive forklifts, strewn about the eastern half of the city, busily attest to the most industrious face-lift ever attempted. Berlin turns back the clock two generations, undoing the Cold War and World War II, turning history around.

The invitation to speak at various German cities about the Jews of Alexandria had come so suddenly and seemed so unreal that I had accepted almost without thinking, the way we accept distant engagements we already know we’ll cancel when the time comes. Could Germany and I really share the same pavement, the same roof, the same pillow? Or, like so many other places invested with too many tales and so much horror, did this land belong to an altered time warp not quite aligned to ours yet close enough to suggest things were back to normal, that old scores have worn themselves out?

I knew of course that the land of “The Counterfeit Traitor” and “The Great Escape” had disappeared long ago, that the sound of the zither, punctuating every scene of “The Third Man,” no longer stalks the glinting dark alleys of a broken city past midnight. This, I kept telling myself, is the Germany of the ‘90s, not the haunted house of the movies. It is a Germany where friends and colleagues disappeared during entire summer months, only to come back totally restored as though they had never really been to this misty underworld where one landed by parachute and barely got out of alive and which I, like so many educated, totally assimilated Jews, had managed, perhaps without knowing, to avoid.

Our hotel too was stultifyingly gray, as was our hotel room. My wife and I couldn’t wait to get out. But outside, it had grown ominously dark, a colorless sky lowering over the buildings as though the entire city were frozen in a black-and-white movie from the ‘40s. It started to pour as soon as we arrived on Kurfurstendamm. We decided to make a run for it and ran to the other side of the street, pulling our jackets over our heads until we entered Mohring’s, a large old-style sidewalk cafe-restaurant that occupies a good portion of a square.

An older waitress escorted us to a table and handed us two menus. We had just had a huge lunch on the plane and weren’t hungry. What to order then? Did they have minimums at noon? It occurred to both of us that neither my wife nor I was remotely familiar with German currency. Should we own defeat and give ourselves away as tourists? Didn’t they know we were, anyway? Hadn’t they already guessed what we were?

Suddenly, I realized what was haunting me ever since landing here. The men sitting at the bar, or having lunch and reading newspapers, or those across the street looking in at our table in this black-and-white remade movie-world were all wearing gray uniforms. This was World War II, and we were among the last Jewish couples around, trying our best to lie low in public, biding our time, hoping no one might wonder why I wasn’t wearing a uniform, or why we looked so nervous, as both of us waited for an anonymous man to come up to the table next to ours and mutter something in code. But he wasn’t showing up and we were growing more impatient and scared and everybody seemed to stare at us with redoubled intensity, as though vestigial stitches of a disappeared yellow star had begun to show on our clothes.

Afterward, on our way back to the hotel, we decide to visit a well-known arcade on Fasanenstrasse. As we stroll about, I am reminded of old Berlin and of Walter Benjamin, the native Berliner who never finished his book on the arcades of Paris and who took his own life in a small town on the Franco-Spanish border, on the eve of the armistice. I conjure the pensive picture of this secular Jewish scholar who loved nothing better than to roam along the streets of Paris, trying to drift his way back to an older Paris he had never seen but had read about in Baudelaire.

I scan the empty courtyard lined with quiet boutiques and shops. In a small tailor shop, a busy seamstress silently raises her eyes to look out her windows at the one or two stray tourists who wend their way in here and stare at her as though she were a figure taken out of Vermeer--gold hair in the fading light of day, candid blue eyes, serene and blissful lips that would have squealed on every last Jew upstairs. All I can think of are families huddled in attics and back rooms.

II

I brought the Holocaust everywhere I went. I came looking for it with the most embarrassing, timeworn, over-the-counter cliches, the way American tourists used to show up everywhere with mini-phrase books and pocket Instamatics--because we are defenseless without them, because they’re our whistle in the dark when the dark is darker than we feared, because they are our nickname for the unknown when the unknown has too many names.

The next morning, at the Berlin train station, I am about to tell my wife about my visions. But, in the large, over-elaborate terminal, my world suddenly goes gray again. Glaring tall men wearing long, black leather coats and Himmler hats patrol the scene, while others, pretending to be reading newspapers, are obviously keeping a vigilant gaze on the crowd. A young man, probably another Jew, with his fiancee, has been stopped for questioning. He is resisting arrest and suddenly bolts toward the train, hoping to escape the Dobermans stationed at the other end of the platform, while two plainclothesmen, their trench-coats flapping in the wind, shout after him, telling a helmeted Wehrmacht soldier to stop the runaway. Without flinching, the soldier dutifully lifts up his rifle, takes aim and shoots. The Jew, who is wearing a suit, seems to have lost his balance and slips from the platform into the abyss. When I look down, his bloodied body lies awkwardly sprawled along the rail-tracks, dead. Someone shoots again. The corpse jolts. My wife and I take advantage of the commotion and board the train to Frankfurt an der Oder. As the train begins to move out of the station, I see the same young man again, or it’s another like him, racing along the platform, raising his hand, begging me to grab it and not let go, as they do so often in the movies--I can almost touch his hand.

Why am I doing this to Germany? I ask. My wife, who doesn’t share my visions, says she doesn’t know why am I doing this to Germany.

III

No one had told me anything about the old temple when we arrived at the European University in Frankfurt an der Oder, but I already knew that the very grounds where I would speak about the Jews of Egypt stood right on the buried remains of a Medieval Jewish synagogue. I keep this uncanny palimpsest to myself, savoring its impish spite the way we relish a bitter piece of gossip we’re dying to let out and know we’ll eventually find a way of slipping into the conversation. Meanwhile the irony sits between me and every German in the hall, distracting each of my efforts to rise above my own mean-spiritedness, as I address an audience fascinated to hear how Jews from Egypt suffered at the hands of a people that were--to everyone’s relief--not German. They like to hear how Jews had lived in Egypt once and how they left under Ramses, only to come back and be banished again and still kept coming back and leaving many times after, expelled for good during my own lifetime. They like the riddle of repeated returns, the return of pardon laced with bile, the will to start over without illusions--which is the foremost illusion of all. I like them for liking my tale.

But their interest, perhaps, is also the price of absolution. We are, like the French and the British poised for battle at Fontennoy, desperately trying to be gallant and let the other take the first shot. I’m desperately trying to avoid sounding peevish over the Holocaust. They’re desperately trying to fess up they can’t live it down. We’re playing a familiar game of cat’s cradle: I take their side, they take mine, and we’ll swap back and forth, stepping into each other’s shoes if only to avoid facing the troubling suspicion that neither is quite finished with the other yet.

In the end, perhaps, what remain is neither resentment, anger, pain nor disbelief, certainly not forgiveness, for atonement is as perfunctory as retribution. What endures, like broth after all settles, are the cliches. Cliches help us think, they help us imagine, and as so many baffled survivors swore on being shown “Schindler’s List,” they even help us remember. Cliches are the archives we plunder when we can’t face our thoughts, when we have no thoughts--when our memories are tired of remembering and want others to do it for them. No one even knows what he feels, let alone how to think of what he feels. Even saying the “banality of evil” trivializes everything--it trivializes reason and memory the way it trivializes terror and pain. In the end, one can get nasty. Or one can make nice. Either way however, the rituals of remembrance always pale before cliches. Holocaust kitsch--movies about, museums for, seminars on--is the price we pay for refusing to let go of what we fear we are already starting to forget. Third-generation survivors go back to the camps with their grandparents. There are no words, there are no songs, there are no pictures, no lenitives. Just the uncanny and sobering jest that seems to capture it all, when on their tour to Auschwitz, survivors are asked to pay before entering the premises again.

IV

It’s my last day in Germany, and I want to take one last stroll on Fasanenstrasse, which I’ve grown to love. I know the walk well by now. The used bookstore, the movie theater, the synagogue turned Jewish museum and/or community center, the parked police car and the uncanny sight of two to three German patrolmen armed with submachine guns protecting the Jewish heritage. The synagogue’s eroded forefront, with its lone residual arch tacked to a grotesque modern square building, is all that remains of what must have been an old, large, probably wealthy congregation. This, I think to myself, is what happens to all temples: In the beginning there’s a first temple, then comes a second, smaller one. Third temples never make it.

I return to the arcade where I first conjured the brooding image of Walter Benjamin during my first few hours in Germany last week. I want to think of him one last time here. Or perhaps I want to think of the vanished universe of arcades, or of how men and things pass and leave no trace behind, or of this city before the war and of the war that took it all down. I want to walk about the neighborhood and imagine the missing buildings and think of this other, Old-World, gaslit imaginary city that bears the shadow of the passage of Jews upon this land and is the home to all that’s vanished and pulverized here. This, I know, is the city I’ll be taking back when I return to the States.

I look up the buildings and see early evening lights speckling the silent courtyard. Children doing homework, parents reading newspapers, cooks preparing dinner. The war is long gone, the war never came, this might as well be 1930.

On my way back to the hotel, I run into my wife, who also happened to be taking a walk after shopping for gifts for the children. By then it’s evening, and when we get back to our hotel, we are greeted by an American couple we’ve met earlier who invite us to their table for tea. The wife loves Berlin, loves the Savoy Hotel and has come to love Germany as well. As does her husband. We’re ordering drinks by now and, perhaps to douse their enthusiasm for Germany, I can’t help but divulge the visions I’ve been having ever since arriving here. “I see scenes from World War II movies played out in front of me wherever I go. Does anyone else have these crazy visions?” I ask. The husband proffers a wry, amused, noncommittal smile, as though to suggest he’s heard about these visions but has never had one himself. His wife, on the other hand, looks almost irked by my remark and, putting her cup down as she nears her face to mine to chide me for nursing such loathsome thoughts, suddenly whispers, “Of course we do, we all do.”

Then, as if something had been missing all through our cocktail confessions, a thought races through my mind: If every Jew has these gray thoughts when talking to the kindest, most soulful Germans, then isn’t the converse true as well? What secret, unstated cliches do they project upon our faces? What do they think of when they walk past our old, defunct temples here? And what thoughts can’t they speak when they read what we think of them? What is the color of resentment when we tip them well, or not well enough?

Or have they stopped thinking like this altogether? Or must they pretend they have? Or, like us, do they simply wish they could?

What elaborate tales must they thread through the eye of a needle each day to live with themselves, with those they love, with the kindness of strangers?