My Germany: A Jewish Writer Returns to the World His Parents Escaped

Part Three: Voyage of Discovery

Part Three Voyage of Discovery 129 11 In the early 1990s, when I was starting to have my books published , an author friend raved to me about how well he had been treated in Germany after some of his books had been translated into German and he did a book tour. It wasn’t like being in an American bookstore pushing just another product, he reported. Instead, he felt respected as an artist and a cultural figure and people couldn’t have been more solicitous and respectful. Touring in America was, by contrast, a poor second, given that authors not in the first ranks were treated as if they were a dime a dozen. “You have to get your books translated into German,” he advised. I was pleased for his success but not at all jealous and not very interested in German editions of my work. I had already been invited to speak in Canada, Israel, and England and had no idea where else my career might be leading me, but it could never be Germany. Though I didn’t say it to him, I said it to myself: “If I ever get invited to speak in Germany, I’ll have to find some way to say no.” One small German publisher did contact me, but I was relieved that nothing ever came of it. 130 Germany was, after all, soaked in Jewish blood, wasn’t it? The vaunted economic miracle that had turned Germany into a world leader, wasn’t that built on everything they’d stolen from the Jews? That’s what my mother had insisted, ignoring America’s massive Marshall Plan. How could I cross its territory or stand on its putrid soil when I wouldn’t even buy something as ordinary as a German coffee-bean grinder, though Braun and Krups made the best ones? All my Jewish friends felt the same, to varying degrees, but they were certainly uniform in saying they had no interest in ever traveling to Germany. One dog lover I knew even joked that she wouldn’t think of owning a dachshund “because you didn’t know what its ancestors did during the war.” Ironically, our family dog was a German shepherd , and I wonder now if my father had deliberately chosen this breed, which was used by the camp guards and Nazis generally, along with Dobermans, in a healing reversal of his scenes of persecution. Had he been threatened by such dogs? Well, then he would bring one into his home, make it part of the family, and conquer one small piece of the past. At the time, however, such a possibility never occurred to me, though the irony stared me in the face for many years. Like my parents, I was hyperalert to “signs” from Germany. In 1990 a distinguished psychoanalyst, Leopold Bellak, published a controversial op-ed piece in the New York Times called “Why I Fear the Germans.” Inspired, no doubt, by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was based on his research in the 1970s into child-rearing practices among the Danes, the Italians, and the Germans. In his research Bellak had found that Germans treated their children more harshly than the other two nationalities, and German children were more aggressive in playground play. “We are interested in manifest behavior ,” he wrote in his original study, “as precipitated by the concern with the facts of Nazi crimes. The fact seems to be that German treatment of children, as practiced today and consistent with what is known of past German attitudes toward child rearing, is strongly correlated with cruelty exhibited by these children and likely to be related to behavior of adult Germans in everyday life.” The conclusion was clear: nothing had changed in Germany because the 131 Germans themselves hadn’t changed. They were passing their malignity on to future generations. I admit that I found perverse satisfaction in this and paid no attention to subsequent letters to the editor that disputed both Bellak’s methodology and conclusions. (It’s only now, writing this book, that I have read them online.) Though Bellak’s was only one opinion, given that it had appeared in America’s most influential and respected paper, and given that it confirmed my prejudices, I took it to be authoritative. Its findings mapped onto an image of an unchanging , simmering, evil people just waiting for their chance...