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IN NOVEMBER 1989, WHEN THE WALL OPENED UP FOLLOWING a surprise announcement, Sophie Marum, the daughter of a rabbi and a longtime Communist party member in the East, was asked if she wanted to join the thousands who were rushing across to the West for a four-decade-delayed shopping spree. “I didn't go there. I am not interested in eating something special. I don't think the things here were so bad. I like apples. I don't know why I must eat bananas.”
For a long time the Westerners had been talking about how the poor East Germans had no bananas. Their Germany was such a failure that it could not even offer its population bananas. Such was the religion of consumerism that West Germany had embraced. A society that offered bananas was better than a society that didn't. When the Wall opened, a curious rumor circulated that parts of West Berlin had become strewn with banana peels. West Germans, Helmut Kohl, and probably most of the Western alliance wanted this moment to be their dramatic triumph, with the downtrodden East Germans, in hysterical joy, bursting into the West, basking in freedom. The cameras were there to record it.
There were people who seriously believed the Ossis would be flooding in to buy bananas. They did flood in. The West German government gave each of them one hundred marks to spend (about fifty-five dollars at the time), a small price for a government to pay to assure its own version of history. According to West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, Germans were now “the happiest people in the world.”
Ron Zuriel was happy. Still a photography enthusiast and still a Berliner, he went daily to the Wall to take pictures of the Ossis coming through. “I was happy for them. To see those faces when they came into the West and saw all those lights and the shops and all that. They came into a different world. For them it was a fantasy.”
After forty years of separation the visual differences were dazzling. The Wessis were throwing the party, and the Ossis came. Irene Runge, now a teacher of cultural anthropology at East Berlin's Humboldt University, heard that the Wall had opened, and her first thought was, “What fun!” You could just cross over and back anytime you wanted. The first night she went over, she turned around and went back. As a privileged Communist academic, she had often crossed over before. There was nothing in the West that she wanted, other than the thrill of walking through without being stopped.
“I was not very happy,” said Sophie Marum. “I did not think it was good that we had gifts from the other side. I didn't think so. Things for nothing. And I thought, ‘In time it will become difficult/I had no illusions.”
In not much time at all it became very difficult, and the staged moment faded. But for the first week Westerners were willing to go to great lengths to make it all seem the way they thought it should be. An American television crew asked Irene Runge, since she spoke American English, if they could film her shopping for food in the West. Irene never shopped anywhere but in Prenzlauer Berg. But they insisted, and she liked being on television. The gourmet floor of West Germany's most deluxe department store, the Ka De We on the Ku'damm, was chosen.
“I would never go there. It's too expensive,” she said.
But they argued that the Ka De We was where they had made all their filming arrangements, so for this one time she went shopping on the famous Feinschmeckeretage. Ka De We is the popular abbreviation for Kaufhaus des Western, or Western Department Store, so called because when it opened in 1907, the city center was the part of East Berlin where Irene's Kulturverein was located, and this was the far western suburb. Bombed into little more than a brick pile, the rebuilding of the Ka De We in the 1950s was seen as a symbol of the progress of West Berlin. Now it was being used as a symbol again, and Irene Runge, who lived in a badly lit world of pockmarked surfaces, was taken to this smooth, perfectly lit sixty-thousand-square-foot gourmet display on the sixth floor. The Feinschmeckeretage alone boasted more than one million dollars in weekly sales and claimed to be the largest luxury food store “outside of Tokyo.”
This was more than bananas. There was Irene in her habitual baggy plaid, followed by a film crew, careening through an alleged 25,000 food items, including fruit and vegetables from around the world, 1,200 varieties of sausage, 1,500 varieties of cheese, and twenty aquariums for salt- and freshwater fish. Was not West Berlin a fun place to shop, now that there was no Wall? Irene did look as if she were having fun. In Prenzlauer Berg where she usually shopped, there were a few apples, a few kinds of cheese, and some smoked fish. Here, the stands were full of things that she had never seen before, things that she could pick up and poke at—like a ten-mark piece of fruit from Asia. The only problem was that she had never seen prices like this in Prenzlauer Berg. Even most West Berliners didn't normally pay Ka De We prices, and once the television crew turned off its floodlights and left, she could never afford to shop there again.
Soon, most East Berliners began to realize that the change was not going to be quite what it seemed at first. “This euphoric feeling disappeared very quickly because they expected too much,” said Ron Zuriel. “They expected to be on the same footing as the West tomorrow. Not in a few days, but tomorrow. So their expectation was too high, and the German government promoted this.”
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had rushed to assure East Germans that their future would be decided democratically by their own choice. Then he proceeded to lure their votes, bribe them with promises, guarantee them that in a united Germany they would get all the bananas and other goodies that the successful Federal Republic, the Bundesrepublik, had to offer. Factory workers were promised that their pay would be brought up to West German standards by 1994. Later, in the spring of 1993, they were told that the economic situation had changed and that their scheduled 26 percent pay raise was just not possible. When workers responded with the first industrial strike since before the Third Reich, West Germans expressed surprise at the depth of bitterness the Ossiswere showing. What had happened to those radiant faces that Zuriel had photographed coming through the Wall and the happy woman in the oversize coat shopping at the Ka De We?
Irene had been naive about the changes that were taking place. Walking over to the West, she did not at first realize that her country was about to vanish. “I never thought that the GDR would be lost,” she frequently said. “I think I just didn't want to believe it. Now I can't believe that I didn't believe it.” She always referred to the unification as “the beginning of the not-the-GDR time.”
“I thought this would be the time for the better East Germany.” But soon there were elections, and the right-of-center parties backing Helmut Kohl won 48 percent of the vote. The Communists, who were offering the kind of program to reform the GDR that Irene had hoped for, only won 16 percent, and in October 1990, Irene's country ceased to exist.
The Stasi, the GDR's state security police or Staatssicherheits-dienst, died with its state, and now its secrets were left unguarded. The Stasi had wanted to compromise everybody. According to Stasi records, it had deployed 100,000 agents and another 400,000 “unofficial agents,” its euphemism for informers. Some East Germans had spied for the Stasi. Others had fed it information. Others had simply been duped into an association. It had reputedly operated one of the world's finest espionage networks. It even stole the underwear of suspects, filing it in jars so that later they could be tracked down by sniffer dogs. Before it covered up the graffiti on its walls, it would analyze the lettering and brushstrokes. It collected minute details of peoples’ lives, such as what time they went to bed. But it also did an excellent job of monitoring popular sentiment. Stasi files showed that there had been a growing disenchantment with the regime.
Once the Stasi files became accessible, people started finding that their friend Irene had talked about them. “You know, I gossip with everyone, and I gossiped with them. That was the problem,” Irene explained without a hint of embarrassment. Someone found a postcard they had sent Irene years ago stored in a Stasi file with a notation that Irene had turned it over. On the other hand, someone else found a letter Irene had written them, apparently turned over by someone else and filed by the Stasi, with the notation “This must be the Irene who teaches at Humboldt.” She had signed only with her first name.
Irene had used her bilingual skills to show journalists and other foreigners around and then report to the Stasi on their activities. She was frequently questioned on her colleagues’ attitudes about the regime, and later on about people she knew in Jewish circles. But Irene tended to see everyone in her circle as loving the GDR. By 1985 the Stasi were convinced that she was untrustworthy and were having others inform on her.
After the collapse Irene was the one compromised German who seemed to like talking about the Stasi and who often mentioned it. Gertainly the many parliamentarians from the former East Germany who were involved with Stasi never mentioned it, because it would have destroyed their new political careers. All three new political parties in the East lost their leaders when they were ruined by Stasi revelations. Even the staff of the Committee to Dismantle the Stasi was found to include some with Stasi links.
Irene had thought that since everyone wanted to start talking about this Stasi business, she should come forward. She and a friend made a joint announcement that they had been Stasi informants. It seemed like the civic-minded thing to do at this point. Other colleagues at the university could come forward as well, she reasoned, and they could discuss this Stasi issue. “Everyone said we have to talk about it. We have to talk about the past,” Irene explained. It was the old Communist way of doing things—have a meeting and discuss it. The new German way, however, was to fire both of them immediately. “All our former colleagues who we never knew were so antisocialist only turned out to be that way after the unification,” said Irene angrily. “I still think it is stupid what they are doing to marginalize people like us, but technically I agree. If they win the war, they will dictate the conditions.”
A Canadian journalist interested in Jews in the former East wanted to speak with her, and he brought along an interpreter from the German government press office. Irene explained that there was no need for the interpreter since she was completely fluent in English. But the interpreter sat in on the interview and wrote careful notes in a little book. Suddenly Irene turned to him and in a loud, good-natured voice said, “I know what you're doing. I used to do the same thing for the Stasi!”
Stasi scandals ruined many of the most productive people from the East, including not only political leaders but important writers and scientists. Most of these people were not agents but simply people who wanted to do things and had been compromised by a conversation—or a series of conversations. Where was the line to be drawn in a society where, as Martin Mandl in Brno said, you had to make decisions every day about what degree of collaboration was acceptable? When Polish General Jaruzelski offered to release Adam Michnik from prison if he would be willing to accept exile and forgo a trial, Michnik angrily responded, “To believe that I could accept such a proposal is to imagine that everyone is a police collaborator.” That was exactly what the system wanted to imagine.
After unification the West Germans, who had never purged the Nazis from their ranks, who had lived for forty-five years with Nazis in government, Nazi judges, teachers, and policemen, now wanted to disenfranchise, fire, and disgrace all half-million East Germans on file at the Stasi, if they could find them. Not all of them made it as easy as Irene.
Moritz Mebel, after years as an outsider because of his Soviet Army record, managed to become head of the urology department at the Charite Hospital. He built a reputation for the department, starting its kidney transplant program, and always felt that the West Germans showed great interest in his work. But once Germany was unified, the same West German professionals suddenly looked down at the work at Charite, somehow implying it was second rate. “I think that all things that were good in the GDR must be put down,” he said. In 1988 he had retired from both the hospital and the university. Under the GDR he got a pension of 5,600 marks monthly, but once the GDR was dissolved, his pension, like many of those that had been paid by the GDR, was reduced by the German government to 2,010 marks.
“When the Wall came down,” said his wife Sonja, the microbiologist, “it was already clear that the GDR was over.”
“But that it would come in the way it came, that we would be a colony,” said Moritz, pointing toward Sonja. “She saw it better than I did. I thought they were more intelligent than that, the Western politicians.” The Mebels’ daughter, Anna, lost her job as a paralegal working for a city service. Most of the East German civil service was fired. But Anna's husband knew how to adapt to the new Germany. In 1990, when he lost his job as a lawyer in the Ministry of Trade, he started retraining as a tax lawyer.
THE FIRST THING Mia Lehmann did to prepare for unification was to reinforce the thin wooden door that had served her Prenz-lauer Berg apartment since 1946, with new thick steel plating. She thought the steel very ugly and covered it with her grandchildren's drawings, but you could not live in this West German society without a strong door. She was not the only one who thought that. At the time of unification East Berlin experienced a run on locks.
In the last years of the GDR, Mia Lehmann had seen dissident meetings in her neighborhood broken up by the police. “I found it horrible. They had a different meeting, and they were persecuted just for that.”
But asked if she was surprised, she laughed, “No. It has happened before.” The years of the exciting new democratic socialist Germany had been weighted with disappointments. But to Mia, the new united Germany was even more horrible.
“Horrible. There are about two million people out of work. The factories are gone. The teachers are changed because they were GDR people and had to teach people what the party said. The doctors are changed. Everything is gone. Everything that was good in our system—And they are so awful. They think they know everything—everything was good in the Bundesrepublik, and here everything was bad.”
Mia's figure of two million thrown out of work in the East was the often-quoted conservative estimate. Among those thrown out of work was her daughter, who had worked at a state-owned communications center that was eliminated after unification. Nor was Mia's criticism of the West unusually harsh. A good-natured new television comedy about Wessis and Ossis was popular, but in real life to most Berliners, the differences were more heartfelt than amusing. Ossis sometimes called the West Berliners Besserwessis, a play on the word Besserwisser—someone who thinks they know better.
Even time was different in the East and West. In the East there was always time to sit and discuss, to schmooze in both senses of the word, according to popular mythology. Easterners were even reputed to have better sex. The Westerners, from the Eastern point of view, were always in a hurry, always cold and insincere. They did not have true friendships. All they seemed to value was money.
To the Wessis, the Ossis seemed lazy, unproductive, backward, and parasitic. They had promised the East Germans everything to make them happy about unification, and then they became irritated because the Easterners expected them to deliver on their promises, as though Ossis should have been grateful that they got promises.
As time went on, East Berliners grew increasingly nostalgic about things that reminded them of the GDR. Not agents and informants or guard dogs. But they liked their neighborhood stores with their limited choice of second-rate food. They, in fact, were willing to continue their bananaless lifestyle. The once official party organ, Neues Deutschland, still maintained about 95,000 circulation. Club Cola, the East German Coca-Cola substitute, also maintained a following. Sales were greatly boosted with an advertising campaign that used a 1970s slogan “Hooray, Fm still alive,” with clips of excited crowds from the early Erich Honecker days.
There was the right-turn-on-red debate. After unification the green arrows next to East Berlin stoplights, which indicated that a right-turn-on-red was permitted, were taken down because there was no such traffic rule in the West. East Germans began painting green arrows next to stoplights. So many East Germans demanded their right-turn-on-red back that a government commission was set up to study it. In East Berlin, where the rhetoric of Communism was still in the vocabulary, this produced the headline, “Green Arrows Rehabilitated.” Local elections in 1994 showed that the Communist party was also being rehabilitated in East German cities.
Berlin remained a divided city, with most Berliners keeping to their own side. Only the tourist map changed, because what had never been mentioned when the Wall was there was that most of historic Berlin was in East Berlin. West Berlin made no sense as a European city. It was a city only in the way that new American cities are—a series of ingrown suburbs that pass for a city because of a critical mass of population and economic and cultural activity. A map of Berlin from before the late nineteenth century does not even include present-day West Berlin. Once the city was divided, people in the West did not like to mention to tourists that the historic European capital called Berlin was actually in the East. That was where the Spree River was, on which the city was built. The old city center was there, along with the working class districts that had grown up around industrialization. The old Jewish neighborhood, the streets of theaters, cabarets, and museums, the historic government buildings were all in the East.
Now you could walk through the once walled off Brandenburg Gate. Only buses and taxis were permitted to drive through because it was feared that the eighty-five-foot-high pillars that were supposed to recall the entrance to the Acropolis would not withstand the traffic. On top was a bronze Victory statue with four horses charging east. Victory had originally been charging West. Napoleon stole the statue, and when the Germans got it back after his demise, they remounted Victory charging East, which, curiously, was the direction of the Napoleonic victory. Through the old unified Germany, the Third Reich, the Soviets, East Germany, and now the new unified Germany, Victory has remained charging East.
The East—the people, the streets, the buildings—was not manicured in that tidy way that Westerners think of as German. Buildings were dilapidated, and exposed steel rods made pedestrians think twice about walking under balconies. Almost fifty years after the street-fighting ended, bullet holes were still splattered across buildings in dense and irregular patterns, cornices were still in their rearranged shapes from incoming shells, and the scars of flying shrapnel still showed.
HEADING NORTH from the gate through a dark, shot-up neighborhood, there was something shiny on the horizon resembling a gilded and egg, too shiny and new to fit in. It was the newly reconstructed dome of the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue, which had been damaged by the Nazis to kick off their extermination of Judaism on Kristallnacht in 1938 and later had been damaged far worse by Allied bombs. Now it was being restored for use as a museum. The few East Berlin Jews did not need another large synagogue. They had the one not far away on Rykestrasse, and they generally used a small side room because the handsome main synagogue was too large for the dozen or so worshipers.
Just as West Germany had taken over and dissolved the East German nation, the West German Jewish Community had taken over and dissolved the East German Jewish Community. In both cases the Wessis had dissolved the Eastern institutions, simply eliminated jobs and positions and superimposed their own institutions, which they assumed to be superior in all ways. In 1991, according to the West Berlin Jewish Community, the two Berlin Jewish Communities were “combined.” Irene Runge called it a “hostile takeover/” In reality, the Eastern one was eliminated. A West German Jewish welfare organization that was principally concerned with the problems of Jewish immigrants moved into what had been the offices of the East Berlin Community on the Oranienburgerstrasse. It became a center for Russians. There was no longer any place for East Berlin Jews. Peter Kirchner, who had miraculously survived the Holocaust in Berlin and had served as both mohel and Community leader since 1971, was simply dismissed from service.
The West Berlin Community recognized that some East Ber-liners should be involved in their governing body. Some West Ber-liners, however, said they did not want Kirchner because they preferred someone with a less forceful personality, someone who, in effect, would sit quietly in meetings. But they also were genuinely troubled by Kirchner's relationship with the Stasi, even though his files showed that at times, such as during the Yom Kippur War, he had showed a fair amount of independence from official GDR policy. Rather than simply snubbing him, the West Berlin Community finessed Kirchner out of his position by exploiting the economic hardships that unification was causing for East Berliners. At a time when East Germans, especially East Germans with Stasi links, had little hope of employment, the West Berlin Jewish Community offered Kirchner's wife a good job. But once she signed the contract, it was pointed out that the families of employees were barred from participating in Community politics. Kirchner had been eliminated. That was how the Wessis operated.
In 1993 a man who had had a history of heart attacks died on the floor of the Kulturverein. He was divorced, and had lived alone near the Rykestrasse synagogue, and while not a religious man, he always made himself available when a minyan was needed. But when Irene called the Jewish Community to make arrangements for a Jewish burial, she was told that they did not know that the man was Jewish. There was only one Jewish Community now, and this man had not been a member.
The West Germans showed so little interest in the Jews of East Berlin that some Easterners began to suspect their primary interest was in the property. This suspicion was fueled by the fact that so many of the West German Jewish leaders were involved in real estate. Most of the historic Jewish property, including the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue, was in the East. That was where the Jewish history was. And it was an area with a tremendous potential for development.
The “united” Berlin Community invited more Russians than East Germans into its ruling institutions. Mark Aizikovitch was invited to join a cultural committee. Recognizing the emerging importance of the Kulturverein, some Westerners, including Moishe Waks, thought that Irene Runge should be offered a similar position. “We have a problem with her past,” said Moishe. “But I don't want to judge these people, because I don't know what I would have done in a totalitarian state.” Most of the Community leadership was opposed to giving any position to Irene. But Waks, who was often a dissident in their ranks, argued for her until it was agreed that they would examine her Stasi files, and as long as they found no strong evidence that she had harmed Jews, they would give her a position. It was still not a simple matter to gain access to Stasi files, but they were able to see what the Stasi had on Irene Runge and it turned out to be quite a lot. When the Community became convinced that she had been informing on Jews in the late 1970s, even Moishe Waks backed down.
Since there was no longer a Community for East Berlin, Irene's Kulturverein became the place to contact the Eastern community, because in reality, even if not on paper, it remained a separate community. There were only an estimated two hundred Jewish East Berliners and another two hundred Jews in all of the former East Germany. Few East Berliners signed up as members of the West Berlin Community. West Berliners were rarely seen at the Kulturverein.
The Kulturverein became a refuge for lost and searching East Berlin Jews. It didn't really matter what they were searching for. Irene did not model the Kulturverein on the old East German Community. It resembled more her memories of her father's bookshop in Times Square. It was a place to come and relax and meet other Jews and talk. It clearly operated on East and not West German time. Irene's description of it reveals the stereotypical East Berlin view of the difference between Ossis and Wessis. “Everybody is on first name. Nobody is into money. It's much simpler. People come here to talk to each other. There's coffee. In the West you have all these millionaires, and you know, it's a different atmosphere. Here people aren't drinking, they're drinking coffee and tea and standing, arguing, and people don't dress up.”
Irene, like many East Berliners, did not like rich people and did not like people who dressed expensively. She liked her neighborhood in Prenzlauer Berg where she lived with her husband, a non-Jewish opera director. She had little need for West Berlin other than the popcorn and the sushi.
The Kulturverein had a kitchen, and there was always food. A jar in the main room asked for contributions, but most people didn't pay. They just drank the coffee and ate the cakes. It was like the old GDR. No one had to pay, yet everything ran somehow. There were still a large number of non-Jews that came. But there were also confused people from the GDR who had lost their country and had suddenly started thinking about being Jewish. They would drift in to see what this place was about. Some would become regulars. Others would drift out again.
A lean, tall man in a French beret wandered in one day, cautiously saying his name was Fred. He had the look of an old-time American Communist, which was what he was. He said he was from Texas, but his English had so many accents layered on it that it sounded unidentifiable. On the other hand, when he spoke German, he sounded like he was from Texas. His father had been a Silesian Jew and had been arrested by the Germans during World War I for agitating against the war. Fred was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1926, where his father, an active Communist, had raised him not to ask questions and to follow the lead of the Young Communist League. Fred had served in Europe in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. In 1950 he was called up again to serve in Korea. Since Austria was under partial Soviet control, he considered fleeing there. But a friend advised him that the Communists were going to lose Austria and he would be better off in East Germany, “It was good advice,” said Fred in his sad-eyed way. “I would have only gotten five years. In Germany I got forty.”
He did not really know what to do in the new Germany. It seemed as if he had wandered into the Kulturverein looking for ideas, and he spent most of an afternoon sipping coffee and talking to whoever was around. “I never thought it would end up like this,” he said. “I thought Communism was the model for the future and everyone would move toward it.” Before he left he said that he had been thinking a lot about El Paso of late. “If I applied for U.S. citizenship, Pm pretty sure I could get it. But I would have to bow my head and say it was the biggest mistake of my life. It was all wrong. And doing that would offend my sense of dignity.
“Well,” he said, adjusting the jaunty angle of his beret, “nice talking to y'all.” And he sadly sauntered to the door, down the dark and tattered stairway, and disappeared into the streets of the former East Berlin.
THE DISTANCE between Ossis and Wessis was even greater in the case of Jews than non-Jews. While Mia Lehmann and Werner Handler had returned to East Germany out of a sense of idealism, trie West Berlin Jews had returned to make money or to enjoy middle-class German materialism. Ron Zuriel had come back to help his father set up a lucrative law practice handling reparation claims. He had never really made a decision to stay in Germany. He had never thought he was capable of living permanently in Germany: “It came about. My son was born here. In my profession you cannot go back and start again where you started. You climb to a perch. And here I had a job morning until night. I worked sixteen hours a day at least. Saturday and Sunday/’ Zuriel was making money and had no illusions that he was doing anything else. Asked if lie had come back to help Jews, he said, “Well, I was helping Jews, and I was helping myself. A lawyer who says he is in the Red Cross is a liar.” The law firm became more and more profitable. In the 1970s the reparation claim business under the West German Wiedergutmachung law started slowing down, and he switched to general civil law. In time his own son became a lawyer and joined the firm.
In 1990 the firm began specializing in the section of the unification law dealing with restitution of nationalized property. According to this law, if a Jew had property confiscated by the Nazis and then the “Aryan” who received the property had it confiscated by the GDR state takeover of private property, the original Jewish claim would supersede that of the later owners. By 1993, there were about two million claims on confiscated GDR property. ZurieFs clients were Jewish and lived mostly in the United States and Canada but also in Israel and Western Europe. Virtually none of these Jews were interested in returning to Germany. They wanted to reclaim the property and then sell it at the plump prices of the postunification real estate market. “They never expected to get their property back,” said Zuriel with an ironic chuckle. For them, it was “a gift from heaven.”
Moishe Waks did come back to help German Jews. After living in Israel for seven years, in 1980 he was asked to run the youth center for the West Berlin Jewish Community. With a lifelong commitment to German Jews, he thought this would be a worthwhile project for a few years, and then he would go back to Israel. Bat he became involved in the profitable real estate market. “If you start to make a living here, if you try to set yourself up here, it is very hard to leave. There is no doubt that a good standard of living is much easier to get here than in Israel.”
Before unification, however, Moishe had still considered returning to Israel. There was no opportunity to make money in real estate there, but he thought he might be able to get something going in import-export. He had made some contacts with Russia. Then Russia had collapsed, and the German real estate market exploded. At the same time things were getting very difficult in Israel. His friends in Israel and his brother Ruwen were growing increasingly frustrated with the right-wing Israeli government, and when Moishe talked of returning to Israel, they discouraged him.
The woman he lived with was born in Israel, but when she was three years old, her parents had returned to Germany to study and never left. Neither she nor Moishe was committed to living in Germany, but that was nevertheless where they lived. And since he lived there, he wanted to be active in the Jewish Community because that was how he had always lived. “As long as I am here, I think that I have to be active in Jewish life and try to do something for the Jewish community/’ he said. To him, part of that was a concern for the few Jews from the former East Germany. But he was almost alone in that view. Ron Zuriel visited the Jewish Community in the East “once or twice” when they were divided. Among Westerners, ironically, there was less interest in the East once it opened. Irene Runge complained that she knew people in West Berlin who always kept in contact with her until the Wall came down. After that, she never heard from them.
“I KNEW THEM from the thirties, and I can't believe they're back,” said Mia Lehmann. Skinheads and neo-Nazis marched through Prenzlauer Berg with their white-laced boots, swastikas, and slogans of hate against Turks and Jews and foreigners. Mia, who had not participated in a Jewish organization since the German Communists in Belgium had side-tracked her plans to move to Palestine almost sixty years earlier, now became a regular participant at the Kulturverein. She had not found religion or forgotten how the synagogue in the Bucovina had closed its doors and made her mother cry. Mia probably never forgot anything. It was just that she thought she should be around Jews, that Jews should stick together, because Nazis seemed to be coming back.
It is widely believed that the fall of the GDR and the unification of Germany brought neo-Nazism to the East. According to the Western version, the GDR was too repressive for neo-Nazis to function, and now, because there was freedom of expression, neo-Nazis appeared. In the Eastern version, neo-Nazism was imported to Eastern Germany from the West.
Neither version is completely true. Neo-Nazism may have had a twenty-year headstart in the West, but by the 1980s, and probably earlier, there were neo-Nazi activities in the East. In 1987 neo-Nazis broke up a concert in Prenzlauer Berg shouting anti-Semitic slogans and “Sieg heil” This was known because for the first time the GDR media were allowed to report on the neo-Nazis’ trial, at which the light sentences belied the legend of GDR severity toward Nazis. Neo-Nazi graffiti was seen on walls, carefully analyzed by the Stasi, and then painted over. Numerous neo-Nazis were brought to trial and imprisoned. The West German government had a practice of paying the GDR for East German “political prisoners.” Curiously, a number of the prisoners they chose to rescue—for substantial fees —were neo-Nazis, who went on to become active in West German neo-Nazi groups. By the time of unification, the extreme right organization had become fairly sophisticated, with the Republicans and their former SS leader Schonhuber winning votes by staying above the fray, the neo-Nazi parties changing names as fast as they were banned, disseminating trie propaganda, while the brutal young skinheads did the dirty work. The same pattern had emerged in other Western countries, including the United States, where orchestrated racist violence was also on the rise. But while the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were concerned about the degree of organization, even international organization, of racist attacks, German law enforcement continued to insist that these attacks were only random. In the; face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and a mounting international embarrassment, in 1994 they grudgingly conceded that there was some organization to skinhead violence. In Germany approximately five racist attacks occurred every day, usually against immigrants, with at least one person killed almost every month.
In 1992 there were an estimated 2,200 right-wing attacks, in which 17 people were killed. Yet in February 1993, Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl said that neo-Nazis were under control and the real danger was left-wing terrorists. There had been only one death caused by a leftist that year. But von Stahl went on to explain that the leftists were organized while the neo-Nazis were just drunken kids.
The skinheads learned when arrested to always say they were drunk, and they consistently got lighter sentences than the leftists. Until 1994 law enforcement had tended to stand by passively and “let the young people blow off some steam.”
The politicians were scrambling to master the winning Nazi issue, immigration. It was true that Germany had an extremely liberal immigration law and that the 450,000 asylum-seekers taken in by Germany in 1992 were twice as many as those taken by the rest of Western Europe combined. But it was also true that at the time of unification the foreign population of East Germany represented only 1.2 percent of the total. Yet “the foreigner problem” was given great credence there. When Hitler had first gained popular support by decrying “the Jewish problem,” Jews had been only one percent of the German population. In reunited Germany, the growing antiforeign sentiment did not correspond to the presence of foreigners. Violence against foreigners increased even in East German cities, which foreigners had left after the fall of the GDR. While Magdeburg experienced a dramatic increase in anti-foreigner violence, the number of foreigners there declined from 9,200 in May 1990 to 1,400 in January 1991.
The extreme right was able to get the government to treat the antiforeigner issue as though it had some validity. Once the right started winning voters, the establishment started talking as though there really were a foreigner problem. The Republican party, by watching their rhetoric and not talking too often about Jews, was able to give the Nazi agenda the appearance of a legitimate grievance, winning seats in municipal elections and respectable showings in state contests.
Helmut Kohl had been trying to gain the anti-immigrant vote for years by toughening the immigration law, but the Social Democrats had blocked him from gaining the two-thirds in Parliament required for a constitutional amendment. At the end of 1992, seeing where their votes were going, the Social Democrats were ready to cave in, and the German asylum law, a showpiece of the West German constitution that was supposed to demonstrate a new Germany open to foreigners, was curtailed. Three days later, skinheads set a fire in Solingen, near Dusseldorf, and killed five Turkish women and children.
Neo-Nazis liked to talk about making Germany “great again.” This was a cause that was spirited by the unification, the anniversary of which has become a neo-Nazi holiday, like Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of Rudolf Hess's 1987 death. It was clear that after unification, many Germans wanted to see Germany's past treated more kindly. Helmut Kohl decided that the 1992 anniversary of reunification would be an appropriate occasion to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first launching of a V-2 rocket, one of the stars of the Third Reich's arsenal. International protest forced him to cancel.
One of the first problems with making Germany “great again” was that it was still a nation in disrepute because of what it had done the last time it was great. For this reason a major part of the neo-Nazi agenda everywhere was to establish that the Holocaust did not happen. This was an oddly flawed argument that basically claimed both that the Holocaust never happened and furthermore that the Jews deserved it. Nowhere was this contradiction more succinctly stated than on the walls of a suburb north of Paris, where it was scrawled in matching penmanship both “Auschwitz is a lie” and “Gas the Jews.”
The right was able to offer Germans not only the catharsis of racial hatred but also freedom from guilt. Germans who were born after 1945 had spent their lives with the guilt of Nazi Germany around their neck. Now the extreme right was freeing them. Republican leader Schonhuber was promising that there would no longer be “a television program of Dachau on channel one, Treblinka on two, and Auschwitz on three.” He called for an end to all this examination of the past, presumably including an end to the examination of his own SS record—freedom at last from the legacy of guilt and at the same time Germans could blame all their current problems on foreigners. Auschwitz is a lie, and the Jews should be gassed.
After unification the issue inevitably arose, as it had in Poland, of what to do with the concentration camps that had been in the GDR, where the Communist version of history had been imposed on them. Two forms of revisionism were being attempted at East German camps. One was an attempt to ignore, banalize, and forget the sights. There was a cobblestone road leading up to the Ravens-brilick camp, where 200,000 women had been imprisoned, of whom 90,000 had been beaten, tortured, starved, shot, or gassed to death. The road itself had been built by forced women's labor from the camp. At the entrance to the road was a stark black-and-white sign that said “Frauen-KZ Ravensbrlick,” Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp. Next to it was a red triangle, implying that it had been a camp for Communist political prisoners. That was one of the badges used in the camps. But the sign made no reference to other badges, such as the yellow triangle, which was used for Jewish prisoners.
Next to the sign was another one with a palm tree, which said “Sylvia's Fitness Center.” There, at the camp entrance, a sauna and solarium were made available, in spite of protests. As a compromise, the fitness center sign was moved slightly away from the camp sign. Across the street was built a new but empty supermarket with a fresh unblemished blacktop parking lot, new windows, checkout lanes, and fresh wires hanging from the ceiling waiting for fixtures. That was as far as the supermarket got before international pressure stopped it from opening. A rival supermarket chain decided to try for one next to Sachsenhausen.
Sachsenhausen had been mostly leveled. One of the few remaining barracks had been burned down by neo-Nazis in 1992. The small triangular field where the camp had once been was now marked with various Soviet monuments. But a pathology laboratory for medical experiments, the remains of a gas chamber, and crematoriums with their iron racks were still there. Nearby, on the site of an SS barracks, the town of Oranienburg had plans to build a new housing project, complete with a fitness center.
But the other kind of revisionism was also in evidence. In addition to building new housing, there was a move for a new monument to the victims of Stalin. While the other Allies had also had prison camps in which many died of diseases, tens of thousands had died of illness and starvation in the Soviet camps. Sachsenhausen was one of a number of concentration camps that, after Liberation, the Red Army had used to imprison Nazis, black marketeers, prostitutes, and political opponents. But the proposed monument at Sachsenhausen would have honored them all equally as victims of Stalinism. This seemed to be part of a broader desire to equate Communist crimes with Nazi crimes. If it could be said that the GDR was as bad as the Third Reich, in time it could be said that the Third Reich—which had racial hatred as a founding premise and mass extermination as a stated goal, and which killed by the millions—was no worse than the GDR, which had egalitarianism as a founding premise but became a repressive dictatorship. Once the German Communists were established as the worst of all Germans, and once all Germany needed to do to purge itself was to chase down Stasi informers, once the German past started in 1945, Germany would be a country like other countries without a special guilt, and it would be free to be “great again.” It was already written in Die Welt that former GDR leader Erich Ho-necker was “the greatest German murderer and war criminal.”
Among the active Sachsenhausen survivors who were objecting to the proposed monument was Werner Handler. He still felt the obligation of the Sachsenhausen prisoners who had asked him, when he was leaving, to tell the world about what he had seen: “I think these men who said to me in the winter of 1938 look here, tell them that we are going in for a war, I feel that I have their vote.” Using the same direct language with which he confronted people all his life, he said, “The original ovens are still standing there in the Fatherland, so anybody saying there's nothing to it, we can bring them there and lie them on the roaster.”
THE NUMBER OF JEWS in Germany suddenly increased. After reunification there were 30,000, and then the German government approved permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to be distributed in all the major areas of Germany, welcomed, offered temporary housing and language lessons, and given a home in Germany. But it was not always clear why these Russians had come. When asked their reasons, they consistently said that it was because Berlin had nice weather. No one else had ever thought so.
Boris Kruglikov, 33, had been a railroad engineer until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Realizing the opportunities presented by glasnost, he started selling radios and VCRs on the Russian black market. Soon this business became legal. In 1991, on an electronics-buying trip to Germany, he learned about the program for Jews and immigrated to Germany with his wife. He had originally hoped to move on to the United States, but decided to remain in Germany. “The social services are good. I was told they are not good in the United States,” he explained.
Stanislava Mikhalskaia was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1990 she learned that her mother, who had been adopted by a Russian family, was originally the daughter of two Jews. Shortly after that a friend of hers went to Germany and told her about the new law. The Soviet Union had just survived a coup d'etat attempt, and the future was looking uncertain and frightening. Since she now was Jewish, she applied, after first marrying her non-Jewish boyfriend. They both moved to Berlin. In Moscow they had both been suecessful professionals with large apartments, a car, and a country home. In Berlin they moved into a fifty-square-foot room in an immigrant hostel. Eventually, they were able to find a small apartment, and Stanislava hoped to resume her profession as architect in time. But Germany worried her. “Germans are against foreigners, and now I think it is not a good country for Jews.” Still, like most Russian Jews in Germany, she planned to stay. Economic and political problems were steadily worsening in Russia.
Most of the Russian Jews arrived with excellent credentials but no skills. They were engineers, doctors, and scientists—but they somehow did not qualify for any work in the West. Their stories were not always convincing. One who spent time with coffee and cakes at the Kulturverein claimed to be a psychologist researching the creativity of left-handed people. He admitted that he did not exactly have a degree in psychology but he was, in fact, himself left-handed. Eugeni Elizatov, 34, from Turkmenia, claimed to be a matchmaker. In traditional Judaism marriages are arranged by a shadkhan whose business it was to know many families and bring together good matches. This looked to Elizatov to be a promising business in Berlin, because there were many Jews hoping to find Jewish mates. But he did not really know how to be a shadkhan according to Jewish law, because he didn't know Jewish law. He said that his parents had both been Jewish, but they had given him no Jewish education. To offer his services to East Berlin Jews, he simply took their names and then tried to find an eligible woman in Leningrad who wanted to move to Germany. Not surprisingly, his clients had little confidence in this process, and in his first two years in Germany he did not make a single match, not even one for himself. His wife had divorced him before he moved.
Whatever their motives for coming, the Jewish communities around Germany welcomed the Russian Jews, and most of them tried to participate in their communities. By 1994, 70 percent of the nine thousand members of the Berlin Jewish Community were Russian. Few of the Russians knew anything about Judaism, but Jewish communities offered them courses in religion and Hebrew that, like all Jewish programs offered in Germany, were widely attended by German non-Jews. In fact, they outnumbered the Russians.
German Jews suspected that not all of these Russian immigrants were Jewish. A rumored figure was that 30 percent were non-Jews who had lied for papers. Considering that there were still Jews wanting to leave the former Soviet Union and that the 25,000 quota was already filled, with no assurances that any more would be allowed in, the Community was deeply disturbed by this. But there was little they could do. They did not want to rigorously interrogate each applicant because they understood how difficult it would be for Soviet jews to prove their Jewishness after seventy years of Communism.
When Mark Aizikovitch came to Berlin, he discovered to his surprise a great local interest in traditional Yiddish songs. He had grown up hearing Yiddish in the Ukrainian town of Poltava. The few religious jews there had died off and been given traditional funerals, as had his father, but when his mother died in 1985, he did not know how to say kaddish for her. He went to the few elderly men left in the neighborhood, but none of them knew either. Aizikovitch had received formal theatrical training, played Chekhov, and sang opera. But when times changed, he learned that the money was in folk rock, and he performed with a Ukrainian rock group called the Philharmonica. When he immigrated to Berlin with a non-Jewish wife and two children to support, he could see that no one was int(crested in Russian folk rock. Speaking no German, he had few possibilities in theater. But this great interest in the Yiddish folk songs of his childhood gave him his opportunity.
“All the Germans are doing a big business with Yiddish,” said an astonished Aizikovitch. “But the goyim don't speak the Yiddish right. They don't play the role. They don't play the soul. They play a few. I don't play a jew. I learned those songs from my grandmother.”
At concerts and festivals of Yiddish music in Germany, thin young Germans with long blond hair would strum a guitar and sing Yiddish songs. Aizikovitch would plant his feet on the stage, and with broad gestures and wild black eyes, he would sing Yiddish in a voice trained to fill a large house. The Germans would stare at him. He was not doing it right. He was not like the other Yiddish singers.
One night, Irene Runge, always in search of things Jewish, was in ihe audience. “I thought, ‘Geez, this guy is unbelievable.’ One song, and then they get him offstage. Then they try not to let him onstage too much. He can sing the little evenings when nobody comes.”
Irene had been taking to some Western ways. She had a computer, a fax, a cordless telephone. She was getting really good at Western media. She cultivated relations with local reporters and foreign correspondents. She made herself available to local press as a “Jewish expert,” then consulted by telephone with her rabbi in Jerusalem to see if what she had said was correct. She loved to show off what she knew, which may have been how the Stasi tricked her. But she was a die-hard Ossi who took to the pace of the West. And now she had another idea. She could sell Mark Aizikovitch. She could make his career happen. She knew how things worked in the West. She could be a New Yorker.
Carefully booking his appearances, she developed his image, telling him to avoid the gold chains and open shirts and keeping him away from the Yiddish programs with non-Jewish singers. Showing her fluency in both New York culture and Western-style marketing, she said, “He doesn't fit into their hippie thing. He's more Broadway, and they're somewhere in the Village. They're sitting in Washington Square singing, and he's onstage, and that's the problem. You know, they are all skinny and they don't have any voice and the guilt feeling. He comes onstage, he looks great. He's in a suit. Nobody wears a suit. They have some kind of rotten clothing… and he has a real trained voice and knows how to play with an audience, and you know that's it!”
IRENE RUNGE'S FATHER was in his nineties when Irene became an outspoken Jewish figure. He reacted to her open display of Jewishness the way others had reacted when she revealed her Stasi ties. He was so angry, broygez, that he refused to speak to her anymore.
Irene was virtually unemployable because of her Stasi record. Many of her friends were in the same situation. For the first two years they had temporary, state-funded jobs. After two years they went on unemployment compensation. Accidentally, the new Germany had provided them with the socialist society that the GDR had failed to provide. Now there was no Stasi to dole out privileges, and no elite. They were all earning the identical state-funded incomes. And when they wanted to do something, they all pooled their resources—“each according to his ability,” just as Marx had said.
Irene's son, Stefan, wanted to marry a Jew and live a Jewish life. But a Jewish wife was hard to find, especially because he did not want a Westerner. Even Israelis were too Western for him. “I can't. In Germany I've tried. But I have no connection to the West.” But in some ways Stefan was not all that different from a Westerner. He had a job as an accountant. When Germany reunited, he moved to Israel. There he lived on a kibbutz, but he was soon back in Berlin. “I don't like it, but I can live better here. I have more money. I have my own apartment. I have a company and friends. In Israel I have nothing.”
And something else had changed for him. “I can go there anytime I want. Why should I move to Israel when I can go there anytime I want?”
Nor was Ron Zuriel leaving Berlin, where he had his law practice and his son and a married daughter with a child. But he did not exactly think of Germany as his homeland. Using the very German word Heimat, he said, “If you asked where is my home, my home, because everyone needs a home, I would say being Jewish is my home. It's a bit peculiar, but that is the only identity, the only point of identification I have, because I can't say I'm German. I have a German passport, I'm German by nationality, I'm German by culture, my mother tongue is German, but I wouldn't say that my Heimat is Germany. For me it is difficult to say.”
He never forgot that he had saved himself once before by knowing when it was time to leave Germany, and he made this calculation: “I would say that the time to leave for a Jew, to pack the suitcases, is when the right extreme party—I would add the Republicans, for me they are also right extreme, although they try to keep up appearances—if they some way or another would be taken into a position of responsibility, join in some form a coalition or whatever, if the existing parties consider them as possible political partners, I think that would be the time a Jew should think twice if he should leave or not.”
Helmut Kohl repeatedly said he would never accept a partnership with Republicans. Some of the local parties were less adamant. It almost happened in Hesse in the spring of 1993.
In that sense Zuriel was always prepared to leave Germany. “Wherever I go, I take my being Jewish with me, and if I ever at my age would leave, which I certainly don't think, first thing would be to search out a Jewish community that would be my point of contact.”
Moishe Waks remained in Berlin, and his brother remained in Israel. Ruwen, like Moishe, had offers in Germany, but he never took them. He joked that his wife would kill him if he did. Carmela had never lived in Germany and never had any interest in it. They raised their children to be Israelis. Ruwen lectured visiting Germans about the Holocaust, lectures that were included on the itinerary of many German vacation packages to Israel.
Looking back, Ruwen was disappointed in the German Zionist movement. “In my opinion it was a big failure,” he said. “We couldn't persuade people. We could not bring to them the message. Everybody was very involved. It was very active all over Germany, but if you look at the numbers of how many went—”
He talked of how German Jews would support Zionism, “until the moment they had to go.” His mother, Lea, still said she had no German friends and little contact with Germans, but she remained in Dusseldorf even after Aaron died. In 1991 both Lea and Moishe finally became German citizens. Nevertheless, Ruwen started shopping for an apartment to buy her in Israel. After all, she still said that she intended to move to Israel someday.
THE JEWISH COMMUNISTS who had returned from camps, hiding, and exile to build the GDR were now living in the Germany they never wanted to live in. One said, “Had I known in 1947 what would happen after forty years, I would definitely not have come back to Germany.”
Werner Handler remained broygez with God and quite a few people. He busied himself with the Sachsenhausen committee and went to municipal hearings to try to stop the city from removing Communist names from streets. He was trying to organize survivors abroad to stop Berlin from reverting to Prussian street names. “What kind of a message does it give to these young gangsters when they see it is Wilhelmstrasse again?”
Werner would occasionally go to the Rykestrasse synagogue if they needed a tenth man, but he was not involved in religion. One of his daughters was interested in her Jewish background and sometimes went to the Kulturverein. The other had no interest. His wife Helle, a social worker, retired. Her program which had given money and help to pregnant women, ended with the GDR. Now Werner and Helle could travel, and they went to Israel. He was impressed by how nonreligious most Israelis were. “Even though there is the theocratic state,” he said with wonder in his voice, “you find the same attitude as I have.”
They also visited the United States, where Jews expressed tremendous sympathy for their having endured the GDR. “Look here/’ Handler said to them. “The question is what I want to do with my life. If I think what I have to do is live decently with my family and raise my children, give them a good education and have a good living and get on in my life, then I must say I'm glad, I had a good life and I didn't commit any crimes. If I say that I want more in my life and look for a better future of mankind, then I must say that I feel sad that the first attempt at making an alternative society has failed. But I am not sorry that I participated in it.”
SIKTY YEARS AFTER she set out for Palestine, Mia Lehmann got there with her friends from the Antifascist League. At last she could understand the vexing Palestinian problem with which the party had always sympathized. But she didn't really get to understand them, to listen to their troubles the way she did with everyone else, because the first Palestinian she and her friends found was throwing rocks at her bus. After the group of old-time Communists got back from Israel, they thought about what they had seen and they talked to Moti Lewy, the Israeli consul in Berlin. Israel was in peace negotiations at the time, and he explained that they might be willing to give up the Golan Heights. “No!” the antifascists muttered. They warned him not to give it up.
To Mia Lehmann, living in the reunified Germany was living in West Germany. “I don't like it now, and I didn't like it before. I came back to have a different Germany, not a Germany like this.” But she was not despairing. She was too busy. There were two million unemployed East Germans with whom she could talk and give sympathy. And she was collecting money to send milk to Cuba, where children were going hungry because of the U.S. embargo.
“I am always an optimist,” she said. “And I think there are enough people who don't like it. The way it is now, this country has no future. You see. The way people are so rich and other people are so poor. It can't go on forever.” She smiled cheerfully, as though she had not lived through most of this fast-paced and terrible century that had been her life.