A Chosen Few (2 page)

The lesson to be learned from Roth, aside from a warning to writers not to publish predictions in books, is that both Judaism and anti-Semitism have deep and permanent roots in Europe. Though Judaism is a less European idea than anti-Semitism, for many Jews, Jewish culture is European—or was.

Because of the Holocaust, Europe is no longer the most Jewish
continent. It may have remained the most anti-Semitic, though Africa and Asia, with their Muslim populations are certainly vying for the title. It is difficult to be certain because anti-Semitism is more difficult to quantify than Judaism. As the nations of the former Soviet bloc struggle for acceptance in the West—admission into Western clubs such as NATO and the European Union—Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have urged that progress towards democracy in these nations be measured by the way they are treating their Jews. This is not as skewed a perspective as it at first sounds. Anti-Semitism, whether in Hungary, Germany, or France, has usually been tied to undemocratic movements. The growth of anti-Semitism in France, from the Dreyfus case to World War II collaboration, was tied to monarchists, fascists, and other groups that did not support republicanism. The Soviet Union was in principle opposed to anti-Semitism, and even outlawed its outward manifestations. But as that nation grew increasingly repressive, it also became increasingly anti-Semitic. The “anti-zionist campaign” in Poland in the late 1960s was the precursor to general repression.

But a more subtle anti-Semitism is allowed to breathe and grow even in the setting of democracy. Now in the early twenty-first century when so much urgency is given to fighting international terrorism, it is useful to remember that in the late twentieth century Jews feared Arab gunmen and bombs in Paris, Antwerp, Munich—much of western Europe. No European Jew went to a Jewish restaurant or a synagogue without calculating the risk of attack. These attacks against social organizations, restaurants, schools and synagogues were met with official statements of outrage and very little else. Almost no effort was made to capture or punish the perpetrators, even when Israeli intelligence offered information that could lead to their capture. Today when wondering how international Arab terrorism could have become so brazen, we should note that twenty years ago they were allowed to kill Jews in western Europe with impunity.

In the decade that has passed since I researched
A Chosen Few
, the standing in Europe of both Judaism and anti-Semitism has barely changed. This is not surprising, but what is surprising is that none of the countries about which I wrote in this book has moved one step further away from World War II. Europe, sixty years after the Holocaust, has achieved no more closure than had Europe fifty years after. Dariusz Stola, a historian of the twentieth
century at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a lecture delivered in June 2001 at the University of Warsaw, “The Holocaust is not a problem of the past. It is a problem of the present. I can hardly find a European country without a World War II problem from Germany, French collaboration, Swiss banks, the role of the Vatican. If you do not have problems with World War II, you are not European.”

The World War II problem, the Jewish question—these are distinctly European debates. It would have been logical to imagine that these issues had to be resolved, before the Jews would return. But in fact they returned before there was any resolution and now children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of survivors, live their lives half citizen and half metaphor.

The Jews have an irrefutable claim on what all Europeans want—standing as World War II victims. Everyone was either—in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg—a victim, a bystander, or a perpetrator. The worst fate has become the best status. Just as Jews have always been envied and resented for whatever they had, they are envied today for their victim status. Europeans need to show that they too, not just Jews, were the victims of World War II. The French and Dutch accomplish this with some difficulty. The Poles stubbornly fight for their victim status. Even the Germans hope that somehow Dresden gives them a chance for victim status.

The Jews of Dresden in the former East Germany have recently found their real life in Germany and their metaphorical one at cross purposes. Across the wide and curving Elbe, in the Baroque historic city center, where blackened sandstone fairies cavort from ancient rooftops, workers waddle by, clearing debris with wheelbarrows. The city is finally digging out from the famous February 13, 1945, British RAF bombing run followed the next morning with an attack by the U.S. Army Air Force. Initially, the German police claimed 18,000 dead. But in subsequent years the count has wavered between 30,000 and 130,000.

Germany fell, and with little chance for recrimination against the rest of the world, Germans have, for a half century, denounced the bombing of Dresden as cruel and unnecessary.

Before it was bombed into a ruin, Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had been one of the prized centers of Germany. The old walled medieval town reached its golden age in the eighteenth century. A Protestant church with a huge dome defining the city skyline, the Frauenkirche, became the symbol of Dresden—like an Eiffel
Tower or an Empire State building. Bach gave the Frauenkirche’s first organ concert.

But for forty-five years after the 1945 bombing, the view across the Elbe was of the piles of stone, staircases overgrown with bushes, wall fragments silhouetted against the sky, the skeleton of one burned-out dome sticking out above overgrown rubble piles amid a huge vacant lot that had been cleared with bulldozers.

In 1949, when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into West and East, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality. They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls and Dresden with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the horror the fascists had brought on the German people. Fascists were the perpetrators and Germans were the victims.

In the new East Germany, history might be rewritten, but it was never to be forgotten. Every February 13, Dresden school children were gathered in a remembrance of the bombing. Townspeople went to the remaining charred tower facing the pile of rocks that was once the Frauenkirche, and lit candles.

All this ended in 1990 along with East Germany. The West Germans, unlovingly known in the East as the Wessies, arrived with their own brand of Wiedergutmachung, making it good again. It was all so nice before the Communists and the Nazis, they said, couldn’t we just put it back the way it was.

Since the reunification of Germany—that is the term always used because it has been unified before—the Wessies have been rushing into the bombed-out parts of the East such as Dresden and the center of Berlin and rebuilding, making Germany historic and lovely again and, in so doing, removing those East German reminders of unlovely history.

In Dresden alone, in the ten years following the reunification of Germany in October 1990, about $47 billion, some private and some government funds, was spent on reconstruction. Dresden’s new tourist literature, in giving the history of the city, seldom offers a date between 1918, when the Saxon monarchy was abolished, and the 1945 bombing. “The Friends of Dresden” brochure to raise money for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, offers no date between an 1843 Wagner debut and the 1945 bombing. Photographs of the blackened rubble, some of it untouched until
very recently, are readily available. More difficult to find is the 1934 picture of little Nazi boys in brown shirts, all at attention for the visit of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the city, or the 1944 photo of thousands of Dresdeners cheering flags of the Third Reich, the graceful arches of the fourteenth-century Augustus Bridge in the background.

A decade after reunification, Ossies and Wessies still look and think so differently that they are immediately distinguishable in a bar or on a street corner. The Ossies look defeated and the Wessies strut like conquerors. The demeanor, the body language, would betray them if the clothes and words didn’t. The Ossie Jews who went back to build Communism and the Wessie Jews, who went back to earn money, along with their children, have remained even farther apart than non-Jewish Germans.

The local Ossies, even the non-Jewish ones, showed little enthusiasm for the Wessies and their billions spent rebuilding the Frauenkirche. Many viewed the project as the destruction of their anti-war and anti-fascism monument.

Other curious controversies have arisen. The Dresden castle was to be restored to its 1733 condition. But as stone fragments are fitted together and missing parts resculpted and a fresh bright layer of gilding laid on, an argument has emerged. Should it all look bright and shiny the way it did in 1733, or antique and historic the way it did in 1945 before the bombing? Should the Frauenkirche be furnished with a baroque organ, the kind of light, crisp, harpsicord-like instrument for which Bach and the other baroque composer wrote, an organ like the original installed when the church was completed in 1743, or should they install a large, grumbling nineteenth-century organ like the one that was destroyed in the 1945 bombing?

Are they restoring the eighteenth-century splendor of Dresden’s golden age or simply undoing the 1945 bombing? Are they trying to remember the eighteenth century or forget the twentieth century? Are there to be no traces left of World War II?

The Dresden debate becomes more tense when discussing one of the last baroque buildings on the restoration list. In 1838, Gottfried Semper, the man who designed the Dresden Opera house and the adjacent Old Masters Picture Gallery, also designed a synagogue. The Jews prayed in Semper’s baroque palace that looked like the Christians’ baroque palaces, holding services that resembled those of the Protestants, in German instead of Hebrew, on Sundays rather than Saturdays. They believed in fitting into Dresden life.

Most Dresdeners remember the synagogue being bombed in 1945 along with everything else in the center. The tourist board even noted that it could not be rebuilt like the Frauenkirche but would have to be completely reconstructed from new materials because the destruction from the bombing was so total. But in fact the reason that no wall, not even stones, remain from the synagogue is that it was not destroyed in 1945. On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, when Jewish stores and synagogues throughout Germany were attacked, the Dresden synagogue was burned. After the mob burned the synagogue, a “civic group” cleared the ruins, an operation for which the Jewish community was forced to pay. Heinz-Joachim Aris, the current director of the Dresden Jewish Community, then a small boy, remembers his father being forced to wear a yellow star as he and other Jews were made to gather the remaining stones from the synagogue and use them to pave streets.

Of the nearly 5,000 Jews who had lived in Dresden when Hitler came to power, by 1945 all but 198 had fled or been killed or were dying in concentration camps. With the Reich rapidly disintegrating, the German government was desperate to kill the last of the Jews. On Tuesday morning, February 13, the remaining Jews received orders to report for deportation to the camps on Friday. But that evening when Dresden was destroyed, the roaring wall of fire that collapsed the beautiful Frauenkirche also destroyed Gestapo headquarters and deportation from Dresden came to an end. Aris and his family were among the 198 who survived because of the bombing.

Herbert Lappe, a Jewish engineer whose parents survived in England and returned when he was three in 1949, said, “When the Dresden people remember the bombing, some of the Jews remember how they survived.” On February 13, when the city bells would ring to signal the gathering at the Frauenkirche rubble for the annual bombing memorial, Lappe’s mother always refused to go.

A group of Protestants raising money for the Frauenkirche felt strongly that it would be wrong to rebuild their church and not the synagogue. They formed a “Christian-Jewish friendship group,” Lappe said. “As always happens with such groups, they were entirely Christian.” Once again the question was not what kind of synagogue the Jews of Dresden wanted but what would be the proper symbolic gesture toward this metaphoric people. The Germans wanted the Jews to have back their synagogue, even
though the Jews did not want it. To the Dresden Jews, the baroque palace was a symbol of their parents’ failed experiment at assimilation. The few who still want to pray do not want to pray in German on Sunday or in a synagogue that looks like a church.

The Jews want to add something different to the cityscape, something that was not there before the bombing, and so the Jewish community commissioned a concrete block, slightly twisted, straining toward Jerusalem, with a courtyard that marks the outline of the original synagogue. This was not what the Wessies had in mind for the new Dresden.

“It is friction,” said Lappe. “It should be a needle in the town. Nothing aggressive. But people should see it and say, ‘What is this?’ ” At the insistence of the Jewish community, the relatively inexpensive $9.5 million building was financed mostly by the city of Dresden and the regional government of Saxony rather than by Jewish contributions. The building was dedicated on November 9, 2001, the sixty-third anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The day after the new synagogue opened, someone had drawn a swastika on one of the walls. This kind of attack on Jewish monuments and buildings by right wing extremists has steadily increased in Germany over the past decade.

In France, though dialogue about the Nazi occupation has been fairly open for a long time—if not since the death of De Gaulle in 1970, certainly since the return of the Socialists in 1981—books, television, film and commentary continue to expose the shameful French collaboration, as though it had never been exposed before. For all its sorrow and pity, France did not have one of the worst records of Nazi-occupied countries. The Belgians and the Dutch did worse. But no one wants to write about Belgium. Understandably, the French love to write about France. So do Americans. And so they continue to expose the already well-documented French collaboration.