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The journalist Hannes Stein was leaning over a bowl of goulash soup on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, when he overheard a German man growling through his cell phone, blaming Israel for the World Trade Center attacks.
Stein had felt Europe’s attitude toward its Jews start to sour since the second intifada erupted the year before. But it wasn’t until that moment when he realized something in Germany was shifting. “It was chic to be a Jew in the 1990’s, before the lure of being, looking and sounding Jewish instantly changed,” he said.
As an editor at the highbrow German journal Literarische Welt, Stein once struck a comfortable balance between his two identities: one a public German intellectual, the other a practicing and politically engaged Jew. Over the last 25 years, the surging German interest in films, books, music and all things Jewish has painted Berlin, and the country as a whole, in a philosemitic veneer. If you were like Stein, with a distinguished career in culture or the arts, being Jewish almost carried with it a fashionable, or “cool,” quality.
But lately, those two identities have begun to clash. German – and general European – disapproval of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, aggravated by the perception that Jewish neoconservatives in the U.S. initiated the effort to invade Iraq, has made Stein and others like him start to feel new limits on what a Jew in Germany can and cannot be. In short: cultural Jews are acceptable, but political Jews are not.
“If you come from the left and show open disgust of Israel’s policies, you’re considered likeable. Then it’s culturally still chic [to be a Jew],” said Sergey Lagodinsky, 30, a political consultant in Berlin who emigrated 12 years ago from southern Russia. “But when you go the direction of supporting Israeli or American politics, you’re not likeable. If you’re Jewish and institutionally active – that’s not ’cool’ at all. Once politics comes up, the table turns.”
The Heyday
It was only a few years ago that Jewishness had been enjoying a hip and reinvented status in Germany and in Europe overall.
Consider the boisterous Klezmer music festival that draws thousands of Polish youth into the streets of Krakow each summer. Or the unabashed marketing of cities like Prague and Girona, Spain, which use their Jewish quarters as key selling points for tourism. And maybe no place has capitalized on the era of Jewish chic more than Germany itself, which, apart from a world-class Jewish museum and the giant Holocaust memorial that opened in the capital last spring, boasts regular Jewish culture and film festivals, Yiddish theater performances, klezmer concerts, and a continuous stream of books, journalism, seminars and institutes dedicated solely to the subject of Jews.
If “things Jewish” still remain to a quiet degree hip in Germany, it has partly to do with young people’s thirst for an identity beyond the country’s harsh judgment of its past.
An example is the 31-year-old university student Nicole Langner from Hamburg, who grew interested in Jewish culture while taking religion and history classes as a child, and who formed friendships with Jews in adolescence and afterwards. Nicole goes out to hear Klezmer music; she visits Jewish museums and synagogues when she is in other parts of Germany. The attraction she feels to the “blend of humor and melancholy” in Jewish culture is actually, Langner believes, the integral part of her own that used to exist and has now gone missing. “It is not something special for my generation to be interested in Jews and Jewish culture. It’s normal,” she said.
Sure, today’s Jewish fetish in Germany can at times look like other popularized spiritual trends, such as Buddhism and yoga. But Nicole is convinced that today’s Germans, by rehabilitating Jewish culture, are looking somewhere deeper – somewhere that will, in fact, help them to rediscover themselves.
“Our generation is searching for a feeling of membership, of belonging to something. So we look to history and in history we find out so much about Jews,” she said.
“It’s about the sense of loss – that they lost a part that was their culture,” said Michael Brenner, a professor of Jewish history and culture at the University of Munich. About 90 percent of Brenner’s students are non-Jews, and he believes their interest is genuine and serious for a particular reason. “The Holocaust has been taught in schools for 30 years. But what they know is how [Jewish culture] was destroyed – not what was destroyed.”
Werner Bergmann, who teaches antisemitism studies at Berlin’s Technical University, explained further: “Sixty years after World War II, there is a difference in the way thirdand even fourth-generation Germans are seeing Jewish history – as a part of their own history, where before it was viewed as something quite distinct.”
Guilt Is a Double-Edged Sword
Ever since the American-produced Holocaust series aired on German television in 1979 and jolted awake the memory of wartime genocide, a torrent of biographies, documentaries and memorials has helped raise the average German’s awareness of the Jewish heritage that once existed here. Now, more than a quarter century later, it seems less easy than ever to draw a line between the cultural praise that some call Jewish chic and others continue to measure as a lasting form of German guilt.
“All this Yiddish kitsch – non-Jews pretending to be Jews, native Aryan Germans forming klezmer bands and speaking in broken Yiddish – it’s a necrophilial engagement,” said Henryk Broder, an author and critic for Der Spiegel. “[They’re trying] to sneak into the shoes of dead Jews.”
A short, heavy-set man with dancing eyes and a Papa Hemingway-esque beard, Broder has become a household name on the German cultural landscape, along with other “celeb” Jews like the film director Dani Levy and the Russian émigré writer Vladimir Kaminer. But unlike those artists’ quieter, apolitical and easy-to-get-alongwith personas – read: likeable Jews – Broder has built a more problematic identity for himself. His controversial opinions on Israel and Germany’s commemoration of the Holocaust manage to stir up both the German and Jewish communities. And as for the question of Jewish being “chic,” Broder claims Germans have shown an uber-attention to exhibits, books and entertainment about Jews in recent years precisely because that culture died and no longer poses a threat to their identity.
“Jewish culture in Germany is held in very high esteem for one simple reason: there are no Jews around,” he said. “It isn’t philosemitism [we’re seeing]. It’s guilt. Permanent, endless guilt.”
And that same guilt, he believes, extends into politics where it promotes different results: on the surface, German and Israeli relations, now 40 years old, have never been tighter. But secretly, Germany is “eager to see the horrors in Israel because it diminishes their guilt” for the Holocaust. In the crudest moral sense, Broder said, “The worse it gets [for the Palestinians], the better it gets for the Germans.”
Which is a point, one could argue, that seems to be echoing in varying degrees these days across much of Europe, where being anti-Israel has become the new euphemism for being antisemitic. From the English academic boycott to the glaring pro- Palestinian coverage in the French and Spanish press, European support for Israel seems increasingly on the wane.
Add to this the historic juncture that Islam is facing now in Europe, and it is hard to say whether a Jewish presence here is ending or beginning.
While the 35 violent acts committed against Jews and Jewish institutions in Germany in 2004 was just one-tenth of the number carried out against foreigners here overall, some 1,300 other “antisemitic incidents” occurred, ranging from hate speech in music and the press to neo-Nazi demonstrations and the destruction of cemeteries, according to Berlin’s Technical University. In yet more precise figures, the number of vandalized and defamed Jewish cemeteries in the country has doubled since the 1980’s, from about 20 annual incidents to 40, thanks to the fast growth of right-wing movements.
The Terms of Acceptance
All this is not to say that it is no longer possible to be a Jew here – as long as one is discreet about it. Hannes Stein’s claim that the only likeable Jews today in Germany are those who “play the role of clown and entertainer and make people laugh” sounds exaggerated, though it may not be far from the truth.
To be an acceptable Jew in Europe, in fact, may now require extending the old balancing act of assimilation: showing the artsy, cosmopolitan and exotic face of Jewishness while leaving not only religion but political opinions as well out of public life.
Sergey Lagodinsky is one of those who feels more at home. “It is exciting and enriching to be a Jew in Germany,” he said over coffee in his East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauerberg.
Lagodinsky comes close in the way of fitting Germany’s new stylized role of the Jew. As a Russian with family ties to Israel and circles of contacts in America, Lagodinsky is literally part of today’s international, globalized society – something that many Germans, still insecure about their own feelings of patriotism and belonging to community, are not. Being a Jew here isn’t like in Russia, he said, “where they either hated or liked or tolerated you – but it was clear right away. In Germany, people themselves don’t know what they feel. They start processing this attitude, asking questions, wanting to find out more [about Jewishness], and you’re the witness to their responses and discoveries. Because the Germans’ experience is so special, I give them the benefit of confusion.”
The American author Holly-Jane Rahlens, whose most recent novel, “Prince William, Maximilian Minsky, and Me,” about a Jewish girl growing up in modern-day Berlin, won Germany’s Young Adult Literature Prize in 2003, has lived in Germany for decades and also admits that “there’s this little bonus point” added to your work if you are a Jew.
Is Normalcy Possible?
For Nikola Galliner, a British national who directs Berlin’s 12-year-old Jewish Film Festival, the truth is that it is “more acceptable for Jews to live here now than it’s ever been.” At the same time, the tensions that still keep the relationship from being a snug fit can’t be blamed on Israel or politics.
“I don’t think there are any normal relationships between Jews and non- Jews in Germany,” Galliner said. “There can’t be because you had a Holocaust here. You can’t just switch over and say it’ll all be back to normal.”
But in an era when the mood is shifting, the message that today’s liberal-leaning Europe is sending is clear: it’s alright to be a Jew – so long as you keep your mouth shut about it. And even then, as the tragic death of Ilan Halimi in France showed in February, there are no guarantees against sudden outbreaks in antisemitism from the continent’s growing Muslim population. While the Germans are doing more than others to promote the sense that Jewishness is still something that is “in,” the question is, how much longer will it be cool to call yourself a Jew in Germany?
“For about five minutes,” Stein said with a wry smile. “Let’s make a deal, Germans: we won’t mention Auschwitz, Treblinka or genocide to you any more if you accept that there’s a real, mortal threat to Jews in the world right now – and you won’t have to listen to Klezmer music any more, either.”