P A R T F O U R
“As a Jew I have been persecuted, as a Jew. Waiki, my beloved, my husband, had been murdered. I couldnt put being Jewish aside, like a dress that had become old-fashioned.
Being Jewish is a fact, but Ym not successful in giving it any content. Not possible without belief in God.”
GRETE WEIL, The Bride Price
20
ASIDE FROM A VERY SMALL NUCLEUS THAT KEPT ONE synagogue on Rykestrasse alive, Jewish practice in East Berlin by the 1970s had become largely a death cult. The biggest event of the year at the synagogue was the annual memorial on November 9 to Kristallnacht. One Berlin Jew who attended every year with his two sons was asked if he did anything else to practice Judaism. “I take my sons to the cemetery,” he said. “They know they are Jewish.”
The only functioning synagogue in East Berlin is a large, tasteful, moderately neo-Moorish building on Rykestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, discreetly tucked behind a courtyard. Most surviving German synagogues are somewhat tucked away. Irene Runge had first walked into a synagogue when she was in her twenties. “It was a Friday night, and I was really in the mood, and it was my step forward.” At that time a handful of young American Jews who were opposed to the Vietnam war had gone to the GDR, and Irene, with her New York English and her hunger for anything American, met most of them. One of them, an American Jew for whom a trip to the synagogue was a banal event, took her to the Rykestrasse synagogue for this major step.
“It was horrible. It was like Germany. No one would say hello or nobody would be friendly, and I thought Jews were like the people I knew and I thought, ‘This can't be Jewish/And I was never going to go there again.” It was, in fact, very German. One hundred people was a huge turnout for a major holiday. Twenty was more typical. The people would file in quietly and take their places in their pews as in a church. There was none of the wandering the floor, debating, match-making, or gossiping that went on in the Rue Pavee synagogue or even the one favored by Jews of Ostjuden background on Joachimstalerstrasse in West Berlin which was even more hidden from the street. On Rykestrasse the East Berlin Jews would take their places silently, sit through the service in silence because few could read Hebrew, and then silently walk out, much like any other kind of German public meeting.
Several years after Irene's first synagogue visit, her Jewish friends—and that was most of her friends—were talking increasingly about their Jewish identity. Their parents had always said they were Jewish, and yet they knew nothing about being Jewish. Now, in their thirties, they were beginning to ask themselves exactly who they were. If they had a Jewish identity at all, it was a negative one. They were Jews because they were not Germans. They couldn't be Germans because of what Germans had done to the Jews. But they wanted to be something more than just not German. A group of them, all officials in the university youth organization, started going together to lectures and cultural events at the East Berlin Jewish Community. Irene found this only slightly more impressive than going to synagogue. “Also very German,” she reported. “You know, they had all the chairs, and then there was the lecture, and then ‘I thank you in the name of blah, blah, blah and thank you for coming/and that was it!”
Nevertheless, in 1975 she became a registered member of the East Berlin Jewish Community. The following year she took her son, Stefan, who, a year past bar mitzvah age, had never been to a synagogue, to a Rosh Hashanah service on Rykestrasse. Stefan said, “For me it was interesting to sit in a synagogue with all the people and to get a hat.”
Stefan had been raised by his non-Jewish father's parents in a village near Berlin. When his father remarried, they moved back to Berlin, a five-minute walk from the Rykestrasse synagogue. Now he was having more contact with his mother, who informed him for the first time, shortly before taking him to the synagogue, that he was a Jew. After Irene had taken him the first time, he would often drop in on a Friday evening. He knew no Hebrew and could not follow the service, but in time he memorized certain passages. Eventually he decided to be circumcised and bar mitzvahed. The circumcision was easy to arrange, since the head of the East Berlin Community, Peter Kirchner, was a doctor and a mohel, someone who performed ritual circumcisions. Stefan remembers almost no one coming to his bar mitzvah. Irene remembers it as a big community success. But Irene was the only family member present. Her father not only would not go, but for years after he refused to speak to his grandson. Stefan's father and stepmother, both non-Jews, were very upset by what they saw as a bizarre extremist activity.
But Stefan was not religious. He simply did it to have a Jewish identity. “In Germany the people don't know Judaism as a religion. They know it as a population,” he explained. “I thought it was a bit of solidarity, and I loved being a member of this population.” He had spent his childhood being moved from one home to another and one identity to another, and as he approached adulthood he was looking for solid things to hold onto. He was drawing closer to his mother at a time when she too was in search of an identity. Mother and son became Jews together. “My mother is Jewish, so I am a Jew,” he said.
But Irene rarely went to services, and when she did, not knowing Hebrew, they made very little sense to her. The first time she ever understood a service was when a rabbi came from Toronto and gave a Yom Kippur service in German. The other thing that stood out about that service was an argument that broke out on the women's side about whether the service was a legitimate excuse to skip the Monday local Communist party meeting. Gradually, Irene got increasingly involved. She began attending the annual Hanuk-kah party and a few other social events. In the early 1980s she was invited to join the board of the Jewish Community. Once she was a member, she wanted to weed out the non-Jews who had always been welcome at Community events. Most Community meetings had a majority of non-Jews. “Because they love going to Jewish places and listening to those boring lectures,” said Irene. “Whereas the Jews, you know—they just come for the Hanukkah party.” To Germans going to Jewish events was an attempt to come to terms with history, and it was always a way to assert that you were “one of the good Germans.” Irene, raised in the Communist elite, always held the notion of members and nonmembers. If you were not a Jew, you were not part of the club and you did not belong at the meeting. Why should Jews have to help the Germans work out their problems?
Irene started having informal meetings to which non-Jews were not invited. She called her group Uns fur Unsere, We for Ourselves. For four years they had monthly meetings, a small group of Jews who discovered that they all had the same background. They had been born in the United States, France, England, or Australia, wherever their parents had found shelter from Hitler. They had all been brought back to Germany when young and had never felt completely German but had never given much thought to being Jewish either, because they were all from good Communist households. They became like archeologists brushing off the rocks of their lives, looking for clues to a bygone civilization. Irene arranged lectures on Jewish law, on holidays, on Israel. She started arranging for Lubavitch rabbis from the West to come for holidays.
MOST OF THE EAST BERLIN JEWS had other things on their mind. Their religion was the new socialist Germany, but it was getting harder to stay a believer. When Brezhnev decided to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, he meant to send a message to people throughout the Soviet bloc. The event marked the beginning of a slow decline in which idealism turned to disillusionment. It made loyal Communists wonder about the entire system. If East Germany went its own way and reformed its errors, which was what many loyal Communists were hoping would happen, would not the Soviets treat them the way they had the Czechoslovakians? The Warsaw Pact was for mutual defense, and a central concept was that the USSR was not supposed to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. But obviously the Soviets would intervene.
When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, in East Germany it was mainly the intelligentsia who were upset. But as the economy failed to perform year after year, discontent spread. East Germans grew a little angrier every year, and as the Stasi accurately reported on growing discontent, the regime grew more repressive and distrustful. “There was not physical repression but mental,” said an East German journalist of Jewish background, “I mean people were never afraid to voice their opinions, especially in factories. They voiced their opinions very openly, but of course the state authorities didn't like it and the people were deprived of fundamental freedoms like travel, to read what they want. I mean, they could see television, they could listen to the radio, but if you wanted to read The New York Times or he Figaro, you couldn't, unless you were a privileged person like I was, who was working as a journalist. Of course we had everything, but that was only a privileged smaller group—writers and journalists/’
Mia Lehmann and her husband often talked about how things were not going well. They had understood the need for the Berlin Wall as a temporary measure, but not as a permanent policy. By the time of her husband's death in 1963, he had become extremely critical of the GDR system. Mia knew that the dream—the new egalitarian Germany—was drifting far off course. As a trade union official, she earned her living doing what she did best. She spent her days in factories asking people why they were unhappy. “I had to deal with people in the factory. I knew what the economic side was. And it went down and down.”
While the average East German was worried about the economy, the Communist elite, like Mia Lehmann, was troubled by incidents such as the Wolf Biermann affair in 1976. Biermann was the West German son of an Auschwitz victim who moved to the GDR and became a popular poet and ballad writer. He had the kind of impeccable “antifascist” credentials that made friendly criticism permissible. But by the mid-1960s, he was being almost entirely censored, and in 1975, after being granted permission for a visit to the West, he was not allowed back into East Germany. This was a shock to many East German Jews who, like Biermann, had suffered under the Nazis and gone to the GDR for idealistic reasons. What had gone wrong that the new socialist Germany would treat in this way one of their own who had come back to rebuild?