Authors return to Germany—via Berkeley discussion

Easy Going Travel Shop & Bookstore in Berkeley recently hosted a travel event of a different sort -- traveling back in time.

On July 30 four local authors gathered for a panel discussion: "Return to Germany: An Evening with Authors Remembering Their Pasts." The panelists, who had spent their youth in Germany, had been invited to discuss their literature, memories and return visits to their childhood home.

The four discussed their backgrounds and evolving relationships with their former homeland.

Anneliese Korner-Kalman, author of "Across the Street from Adolf Hitler: A Memoir," was born to Jewish parents in Munich. She lived across the street from Hitler's private residence and after being summoned and then released by the Gestapo, fled to Switzerland in 1935, eventually joining her family in New York. She is professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School. She was reluctant to revisit her birthplace, but in 1983, "at the insistence of my German colleagues," returned to Munich to make a presentation at a conference.

She remembered "feeling overwhelmed" by her recollections of the Nazi era, yet this difficult visit was also the beginning of her fuller understanding of that time. It wasn't just the crimes and atrocities against the Jews, she realized, "Hitler betrayed Germany."

Eva Wald Leveton's "Eva's Berlin: Memories of a Wartime Childhood" chronicles her experiences as the daughter of a Jewish German father and a Lutheran German "Aryan" mother. She spent the war years in Berlin with her mother, and eventually settled in the Bay Area. She is now a psychotherapist and professor of drama therapy at California Institute for Integral Studies.

She has fully embraced American life, yet her German roots, especially the language, still have a strong hold for her, she said. "There's very little room for me to express the German part of myself, and so for me going back means continuing in a little way to fill out a role which I was born to."

"An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust" is a Holocaust memoir by friends Frederic Tubach and Bernat Rosner. Tubach, the son of a German army soldier, lived in the village of Kleinheubach and at 13 was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth movement. Rosner was a Hungarian Jew who at 12 was sent to Auschwitz with his family.

The two met in 1983 in the Bay Area. Their book explores the friendship that developed and how it forced each to come to terms with his past. Tubach is professor emeritus of German at U.C. Berkeley, and Rosen is the retired general legal counsel for Safeway Corp. (Rosner did not attend the reading. However, Sally Patterson Tubach, Frederic's wife, also sat in on the panel. She worked on the book with the two men.)

Tubach admitted there are no easy answers concerning Germany under the Nazis. As a member of the U.C. community in the '60s, Tubach became more sensitized to the violence of institutions during the student demonstrations. "My experiences here affected my view of Germany," he explained. He returned to Germany to live for awhile in the early '70s and found a country profoundly changed from the one he remembered. Last year he returned to Germany to read from his book.

When the program segued into a question-and-answer session, one audience member asked about the Germans' knowledge of the Holocaust.

The speakers stressed the fascist regime's strict control over information. It's hard for Americans to understand what happens in a dictatorial society, said Tubach, who illustrated his point with a story about an SS officer's return from Poland as a war hero. The man refused to talk about his experiences, even to other Germans, and Tubach explained that even for the military elite, talk was punishable by death.

Leveton said that although she and her mother knew people were being taken away to camps, they didn't know the extent of what was happening. "People that talked about these things could get killed," she said. Then, bringing the topic closer to home, she asked: "What do we know what's happening to the [U.S.] political prisoners right now?"

Audrey Berger, events coordinator at the bookstore and the person responsible for inviting the authors to speak, wanted to know about their trust in humanity.

Korner-Kalman acknowledged the difficulties, but expressed gratitude at the global progress over the years "in countries like South Africa."

Leveton admitted to a certain kind of optimism, which lives alongside a deep distrust. "I don't know how much faith I have in humanity, but in humans I have a lot."

Tubuch said he is "an optimist by faith," not by total conviction, while his wife acknowledged being a pessimist -- but "I try to believe that things will get better and to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Even after the program ended, discussion continued.

Tubach, who had not previously met the other authors, enthused about "their sophisticated perspectives."

Philippa Feldman of Berkeley strongly connected to the personal nature of the authors' stories. She is Jewish and lived in Germany for many years. "I was impressed by the basic optimism that the people on the panel had, despite their traumatic experiences," she said.