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Not everything about 'new Germany' is good news
DR. GORDON M. WEINER
Special to Jewish News
The Jewish News article (Sept. 11) headlined "Journey toward understanding," on Rabbi Barton Lee and his ASU Hillel students who visited Germany this summer, left me with a very uneasy feeling. I say this as one who has been "shlepped" to Germany six times in the last 12 years, since the kabbalistic manuscripts and Christian Hebraist writings on which my wife works are housed there. I last for about 10 days and then I have to cross the border. Thankfully, my own research takes me to Amsterdam and I can now drive without maps across Northern Germany to effectuate my escape. The deal I struck with my wife was that if we went, we would have to visit one of the 12,000 concentration camps every weekend.
For me, going to Germany is like a black visiting rural Alabama or Mississippi. I do not doubt that some whites have overcome the hundreds of years of anti-black conditioning that was a hallmark of Southern culture. Nor do I doubt that some, perhaps even many, Germans have overcome the thousands of years of anti-Semitic conditioning their culture fostered.
Of course there were a few German righteous gentiles whose memories are enshrined at Yad Vashem. They, their descendants, and the other hand-picked Germans selected by the German Foreign Office who helped sponsor the Hillel trip would lead relatively unsophisticated American Jewish college students to have a glowingly positive reaction to the "new Germany."
I remember my visit to the bucolic town of Goslar in the Hartz Mountains, with its World War II memorial to the noble German soldiers killed in Soviet camps. I recall the good residents of Wolfenbuttel, who would never dare to cross against a traffic signal (just following orders), but who refused to allow a marker to be placed on a newly discovered synagogue in the town. Then there was my visit to the university town of Gottingen where, while having a cool drink at the sidewalk cafe, I was able to watch the neo-Nazi skinheads attack a group of Turkish teenagers eating ice cream in the town square.
The nightly television news broadcasts also showed me the "new Germany." No longer were Jews targeted; now three-quarters of the broadcasts were concerned with the "auslanders" (foreigners) working in Germany. I also had the good fortune to visit the beautiful town of Lubeck just two weeks after the synagogue had been fire-bombed.
Just like the students, I too had the opportunity of visiting Buchenwald. However, contrary to the history presented to the students, Buchenwald was a concentration camp that had existed before the war began. Perhaps the student who "couldn't take it ... started crying and had to leave" should have gone through the museum to learn what really happened there. She would have seen the letter from the "new German" BMW folks requesting their next shipment of slave labor. Of course, to be even-handed, one should make mention of Bernard Bellon's "Mercedes in Peace and War" for those Jews who prefer this product of the "new Germany."
Let me close by relating an incident that occurred this summer. I had been trying to convince my wife to consider changing her research focus to the kabbalistic origins of the French Enlightenment. This would get us out of the "new Germany" and into France. While eating dinner in a charming restaurant near the caves of Lascaux in Southern France, we were discussing the CNN report of new skinhead violence that appeared on television. On my way back from the men's room, the couple that had been sitting next to us at dinner stopped me to tell me that not all Germans supported the skinheads. After dinner we joined this lovely German couple in the bar. He was a Ph.D. in classics and she ran a prosthesis firm. In the midst of our lengthy discussion, I was asked if I could please define a term that I had been using that they did not understand. That term was "synagogue."
Dr. Gordon Weiner is a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and former director of ASU's Jewish Studies Program.
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