In Berlin, stories of the shtetl

In the chic Mitte section of what was once East Berlin, international crowds flock to the renovated Hackesche Hofe. The eight linked courtyards, with their brightly glazed Art Nouveau tile work, overflow with restaurants, cafes, art galleries, clothing boutiques, a bicycle shop and a cinema, along with apartments and offices.

In Courtyard Two, a retired Los Angeles accountant, a group of Danish tourists, an unemployed Russian emigre and students from across Germany converge on a venue that seems both to evoke German history and transcend it: the Hackesches Hoftheater, a small, black-box space that proudly offers “Jiddische Kultur am Historischen Ort” (“Yiddish culture in a historical place”).

In the neighborhood the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn once called home, where thousands of East European Jewish immigrants settled between the world wars and where Berlin’s growing, largely Russian Jewish community is centered, the stories and music of the shtetl have been reborn.

The man behind this revival is Burkhart Seidemann, a Protestant minister and professional mime with a passion for the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem and Itzik Manger. “The Nazis murdered the Jews who were the bearers of the culture, but ... this culture was not murdered,” says Seidemann, 60, who founded the 99-seat nonprofit theater in 1993 and has run it, without a salary, ever since.

His is the only Yiddish theater in Germany and one of a handful outside of Israel. Even New York City, where the Yiddish theater once thrived, has only one, the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre, founded in 1915. Yiddish culture survives, says Seidemann, in the form of a literature with a unique philosophical stance toward the world -- a sardonic humor in the face of life’s mishaps. “For me personally, it’s a very great discovery,” he says, “and I say that this discovery must be shared with the world.”

As Seidemann talks, his expressive eyes grow wide, and his hands flutter elegantly in front of him. He pauses to act out different parts from a familiar production -- a theatrical polymath, he acts, directs and writes plays -- and to point out the collections of Yiddish stories that line the bookshelves of his tiny office.

Raised in Weimar, in the former East Germany, Seidemann was imbued early on with the state’s “anti-fascist” ideology and revulsion toward Nazi crimes. His own name is Jewish, he says, and he has 19th century Jewish ancestry on both sides of his family. But, he says, “for me, this is not important.” His outlook is humanistic and universalistic. “A culture,” he says, “belongs to those who love it.”

Seidemann didn’t set out to found a Yiddish theater. He was searching for a home for his mime troupe, whose relationship with the classics-oriented Deutsches Theater had been severed in 1991, after German reunification. The klezmer music revival in Berlin was in full swing, musicians were pressing for a performance space, and “the history of this area started to speak to me,” Seidemann says.

There is still some pantomime at the Hackesches Hoftheater. But the theater’s 200 yearly performances consist mostly of klezmer and other Yiddish music concerts and Yiddish musical plays. Seidemann, who makes his living doing other theatrical work in Berlin, says that about half of the actors and others involved with the theater are Jewish. (One irony of the craze for Jewish music that’s continued in Germany for more than a decade is that the culture it evokes was always foreign to Germany’s native Jews, who tended to be highly assimilated.)

From the beginning, Seidemann has collaborated closely with Jalda Rebling, a leading interpreter of Yiddish and other Jewish musical traditions. Rebling’s Dutch Jewish mother, Lyn Jaldati, survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she knew Anne and Margot Frank, and Rebling says her mother was the first to tell Otto Frank of his daughters’ deaths.

Some non-Jewish Germans involved with the klezmer revival lack sensitivity to the music and the cultural tradition, Rebling says, but Seidemann is “a very intelligent man who knows what he’s doing.” His “great strength” as a director, she says, is in finding “little pictures in the action” -- no doubt an artifact of his mime background.

This summer, Rebling and Mark Aizikovitch, an emigre from Ukraine, reprised roles they’d played previously in Manger’s “Spiel von der Schopfung” (Creation Play), known in Yiddish as “Di Chumesch Lider.” Premiering in May 1993, this was the first theater piece performed at the Hackesches Hoftheater. A pastiche of Old Testament tales, it is a modern adaptation that mixes German and Yiddish, story and song, the traditional and the new.

‘Something poetic’

Juxtaposing German and Yiddish is the theater’s signature technique, developed to make the works more accessible to Berlin audiences. It allows audiences to “experience something poetic -- not in the sentimental sense but rather a poetry of recognition,” says Seidemann.

The theater also produces new works, such as Peter Adrian-Cohen’s well-reviewed “Verstehn Sie Mich, Herr Goldfarb” (Do You Understand Me, Herr Goldfarb?), which debuted in 2000. The show focuses on the problem of a cantor on tour whose pianist becomes ill and must be replaced by a German non-Jew. It speaks directly to the issues of tolerance and prejudice at the heart of the theater’s mission -- and culminates in a triumphant concert.

Seidemann says that his theater has been criticized as a sort of “Jewish Disneyland,” a characterization he naturally rejects. Nor does he see the theater as a memorial, or a form of reparations, for which he uses the usual term Wiedergutmachung (literally, “making good again”). “It’s a protest against the effects of the Shoah,” he says -- and, more than that, a way of guaranteeing that Germans must “nicht wieder Schlect machen [never again do evil].”

“It’s a great thing that in Berlin, where the Final Solution of the Jewish question was conceived, people can again come ... and find traces of a tradition that passed through here and that even Jews had forgotten,” Seidemann says. As Germany’s Jews fled to America, Palestine and Argentina, he says, this culture remained, awaiting their return.

On a typical night at the Hackesches Hoftheater, the klezmer band Folkinger entertains a packed house, seated in rows and also cabaret style near the stage. Classic Yiddish songs such as “Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn” (To Me You Are Beautiful) elicit the joy of recognition, but only those who’ve actually been to a bar mitzvah sing along quietly to “Hava Nagila,” a Hebrew lyric set to an old Jewish melody.

Among them is Richard Laurence, a retired accountant from Los Angeles accompanied by Alfred Mueller, a Berlin accountant and an old friend. “I enjoyed it, enjoyed it immensely,” Laurence says of the concert. “The music is part of our culture.”

Folkinger’s lively playing earns three encores. Finally, the audience spills outside, but the music doesn’t end. The band reprises “Hava Nagila” on the steps of the theater, and the infectious music and responsive clapping fill the small courtyard in the cool summer night.