“So, uh, you’re Jewish. That must be, uh, nice.”
Participants on a recent American Jewish Committee trip to Germany may not have had this exact conversation. But many Jews have endured well-meaning but awkward attempts by Germans to not only be friendly but also somehow make amends for the misdeeds of their grandfathers.
With the day within our sight when Holocaust survivors — and perpetrators — will be found only within the pages of books, the German government and Jewish organizations have commenced steps to continue the nation’s “special relationship” with Jews.
But for a generation of young Germans that has been well-schooled (some would say exceedingly well-schooled) on their nation’s past and seem to be experiencing “Holocaust fatigue,” this will require some innovative thinking.
“There is still a continuing support for the existence of the state of Israel. Although in younger circles, the Holocaust guilt affected their parents’ generation, with our generation and the high school students we met they certainly don’t have the guilt,” said Kelly Ramot, assistant director of the AJCommittee’s San Francisco office and a group leader for the Germany trip.
The attitude she often encountered went something like this: “OK, we committed crimes, we atoned for our sins, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t my parents, it may have been my grandparents but nothing like that ever happened in my family. Let’s move on.”
Even worse, noted fellow trip participant Dan Halperin of San Francisco, a growing number of Germans seem to feel the German population of yore was hoodwinked into World War II by a “small group of Nazis, and the masses were not guilty of any crimes.”
This is a real and serious situation, and it’s difficult to explain to Germans born in the 1980s exactly why they should harbor perpetual guilt for events in the 1930s and ’40s. Coming up with a solution is still a work in progress, though the German government undoubtedly hopes organizing trips like the late October/early November AJCommittee jaunt will help. The youngish Jews (about two dozen participated) met with the best and brightest of Germany’s diplomatic corps, members of an elite group all aged 35 or younger.
The obvious problem is that, for many Germans, especially those who don’t live in large cities, Jews remain a concept rather than a tangible group of people. The estimated Jewish population of Germany, a nation of roughly 82.5 million, is 115,000 (with some projections estimating a drop of around 7,000 Jews over the next 15 years). Comparatively, France, a nation of 61 million, has an estimated Jewish population of 500,000 or 600,000. New York City alone may have 1.75 million.
Still, the Germans’ interest in the nation’s renaissance of Jewish culture is palpable, which often leads to odd situations.
“In Berlin there’s a resurgence of Jewish activity [such as] a klezmer music festival. And many of the people attending those events are not Jewish,” noted Halperin.
“There is a real keenness to experience things Jewish.”
On the other hand, “things Jewish” may not be the same as “Jews.” A Berlin yeshiva the group visited was recently installed in a remodeled former synagogue that was burned on Kristallnacht. Yet the transformation of a charred building that had served murdered Jews into a center for Berlin’s contemporary Jews did not sit entirely well with its German neighbors. The ruined synagogue served as a reminder of the past, a reminder many residents valued more than a cultural hub for Jews of the present (a compromise was reached which balanced the building’s past and present uses).
Yet perhaps the most moving element of the trip was the AJCommittee’s meeting with Turkish community leaders in Germany who complained of being stigmatized as possessing “dual identities” in much the same way German Jews used to be.
And all is not well within Germany’s Turkish community, either. The anti-Semitism freely expressed in community publications finally got to be too much for Aycan Demirel, who founded an organization to combat anti-Semitism in Germany’s Turkish and Muslim communities. He’s had some success — Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic speech is illegal there and he’s been able to get some Web sites and newspapers shut down — but there’s more work to be done.
After returning to San Francisco, the group raised $5,000 for Demirel’s operation.
“He lives in those communities, he lives in the neighborhood and he was offended by hate material,” noted Ramot.
The AJCommittee group, incidentally, may well have been the first Jews Demirel ever met.