Being Jewish in the New Germany

Chapter 4: Representing Jews in Germany Today

Representing Jews or Germans is not only about “real Jews” or “real Germans ,” but also about how these and other groups conceive of and understand each other as depicted in various forms, such as television, film, literature, art, advertising and of course, the Internet. Even before the notion of the “virtual” became commonplace, knowing what is “real” and what is not was difficult. We live in a world inundated with images and words that project so many conflicting representations. This confusion is especially acute when representation concerns people who are different, unfamiliar, and even strange. Filtered through our imagination, representations compete with the urge to know objectively who people really are. It is easier to present what we may not know or understand in stereotypes and clichés, for example, seeing all Jews as victims and all Germans as Nazi perpetrators. The Holocaust’s effect on the relationship of Jews and Germans has made these two groups particularly susceptible to such limited representations. When tolerance and integration into a democratic civil society are at stake, representations—which are about all most Germans have in a country with so few Jews—do matter. In short, “representations ” are, as anthropologist Paul Rabinow once claimed, “social facts.”1 For a study that is decidedly about Jewish life rather than Jewish death in Germany, conventional and flat representations proliferate, even overly positive ones. Who can forget the American love affair with the musical and film Fiddler on the Roof (known in Germany as the popular musical Anatevka), a romanticized and sanitized version of Eastern European shtetl Jewish life? The optimistic musical refrain “To life, to life, l’chaim” that echoes my own concern with Jewish life in this book, does not, however , really capture the harsh circumstances of Jewish lives under the 60 4 R e p r e s e n t i n g J e w s i n G e r m a n y To d a y Russian czar that drove many Jews to leave for more secure havens. But then again, all the singing and dancing, the pathos and the tears made us American Jews feel good, since so many of our ancestors escaped this world and made it to a richer and safer America. While neither real nor objective, this vision of happy shtetl life, even with its poverty and prejudice , still colors the understanding of many Jews and non-Jews about life in these Eastern European villages. And while the musical and film are not about the Holocaust, one could not help but think that those Jews who stayed and survived the relentless pogroms were to perish some decades later under far worse circumstances. I remember seeing the musical on Broadway in the 1960s and thinking how lucky my family was to have left Eastern Europe, and how unlucky were those who stayed. As an American Jew, in fact, an Ostjude myself, I grew up seeing us as victims, a representation that was gruesomely depicted in the many documentaries on the genocide. These contrasted with the popular American World War II movies that portrayed Germans as one-dimensional evil Nazis, cardboard figures screaming or grunting in an ugly language my parents thought suited their brutality. The advent of the television comedy series “Hogan’s Heroes” (shown in Germany years later) did little to mitigate the image of Germans running a prisoner-of-war camp for Americans as ludicrous, stupid buffoons. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the German war film Das Boot, preserving its German title, showed American audiences German sailors not as brutal Nazis, but as humane victims with complicated psychologies and sensitive emotions. Representations are, of course, always part reality or fact, part myth or fiction, and largely interpretive. We have seen how difficult it is to define who is a Jew. Yet, while legal definitions must be made for pragmatic reasons in civil societies, identities are built on experience. Having a Jewish father and a gentile mother, I may feel I am a Jew, but in Germany I am not Jewish enough to join the Jewish Community there. In the United States, I am Jewish, not only according to institutional Reform Judaism, but also as to how I see myself, feel, and am regarded as a Jew. Indeed, German citizenship is now granted more easily, but as a Turkish German, African German, or Jewish German, I may never feel that I am German, even with the...