Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History

For Roland

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

– THEODORE PARKER, anti-slavery abolitionist

Contents

Prelude: A Journey to the Stricken Lands

MEMORY AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

1 The Stone of Sisyphus: Germany

2 Through a Glass Darkly: France

3 Erasing History: Pretense and Oblivion in Japan

WAR, MEMORY AND RACE

4 The Shadow of Slavery: The United States

5 The Beloved Country: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

WAR, MEMORY AND IDENTITY

6 Who Will Own the Holocaust?

7 The Furies of War Revisit Europe: Yugoslavia and Bosnia

IS THERE JUSTICE?

8 New Genocide, New Trials: The Legacy of Nuremberg

Coda: In the Wake of Memory and Forgetfulness

Notes

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

Prelude

A Journey to the Stricken Lands

In his landmark work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell reminds us of what the powerful have always known: He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. Although I first read Orwell’s novel as an adolescent, I was well into university before I thought about what he might have meant. In fact, I vividly remember the occasion: it was a class in philosophy, and the professor was talking about the ways that those happenings we call history can be shaped by selection or manipulation. Since I had unthinkingly looked upon the known past as a circumscribed collection of facts that had been dutifully recorded by a tribe of faithful scribes, the idea that history might be vulnerable to interpretation—possibly malevolent interpretation—stirred my imagination. Perhaps learning happens when we are startled out of prejudices we are barely aware of.

Looking back, I may have taken the first step towards writing this book in that long-ago classroom, but the driving force came from my years living in France, during the 1960s, when I first encountered the grisly reality of the Second World War and the Holocaust by inadvertently stumbling across Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi death camp in the Vosges mountains, during a carefree weekend outing with school friends. A guide led us around the site. We were alone; there was no one else in that remote place. Trailing behind him, we entered a small building. Inside were two rooms, one of which was a gas chamber. We gaped while he explained that a Jewish mother and her adolescent daughter were the first to die there. I grew taut with dread, overcome by the instant crush of my imagination: that mother became my mother, I was her terrified child. We shuffled numbly next door—to the dissection room. In the centre was a large table with channels for runoff blood. It was an oversize version of my mother’s silver well-and-tree platter.

Nothing in my earlier life had prepared me for that encounter—I barely knew about the mass murder of the European Jews—and the shock affected me in lasting ways, creating a puzzle in my mind about remembrance. Because what was striking about my French friends and neighbours in those days was not so much what they said about the war as what they did not say. My questions were usually met with evasive replies or claims of wartime heroism on the part of the French Resistance. And there was complete silence about the fate of the French Jews, who seemed to have been left out of the story altogether. It was 1983 before the many-faceted pieces of that youthful experience began to fit together: that was the year fugitive war criminal Klaus Barbie was captured in Bolivia and transported back to France, where he eventually stood trial for his wartime role as head of the Gestapo in Lyons.

From the moment I heard about Barbie’s arrest, there was no question in my mind that I would write a book about him—about his connection to France and France’s connection to him. I sensed immediately that his story might allow me to explore the mysterious lacunae I had felt when I lived in the country, because, from the first announcement of his arrest, people began to talk as though their words had been bottled up under pressure and had just been uncorked. Barbie’s return to French soil occasioned a virtual explosion of talk—and opened the door to a passionate national debate about the Vichy Collaboration. By the time I finished that work, I was hooked on the ambiguities of history: I could imagine nothing more compelling than to hunt down the ways that the past is managed to suit the perception of our present needs.

The question is, Whose perception and whose needs? Who gets to decide what happened yesterday, then to tell the tale?

As we begin the twenty-first century, many nations are wrestling with their unassimilated history. South Africa has held its extraordinary truth and reconciliation hearings, in the hope that the confession of crimes committed during the apartheid era might help heal the wounds of oppression and lay the foundations for a democracy that includes a full recognition of human rights. Since the end of the Second World War, Germany has paid more than 104 billion Deutschmarks in reparations to more than 500,000 survivors of the Holocaust and is still struggling over how to cope with the memory of that terrible time. France since the 1980s has been trying to come to grips with its legacy of antisemitism and wartime deportations, and in 1995, the government finally apologized to the country’s Jewish citizens. But the 1997–98 trial of Maurice Papon, the Vichy civil servant who was responsible for Jewish Questions in the Bordeaux region during the Occupation, made it clear that the national wound inflicted by questionable actions fifty years ago still festers. In Japan, there is increasing pressure to apologize to wartime victims: the so-called comfort women, who were sex slaves to soldiers; Allied prisoners of war; survivors of the 1937 Rape of Nanking, an event that is once again attracting public attention in the West; and anyone who escaped from, or survived, the Japanese medical installations in China and elsewhere, where experiments were performed on living subjects to develop tools of biological warfare. On the other side of the Pacific, Americans continue to struggle with the corrosive legacy of their slave past. In Chile, after almost thirty years of privileged licence, General Augusto Pinochet was indicted, under international law, for his crimes; and it now seems inevitable that Argentines who were responsible for the disappearance of thousands will also see their immunity dissolve. Finally, two international United Nations courts—one in The Hague, the other in Arusha, Tanzania—are trying people for crimes against humanity committed throughout the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda in the 1990s. Other tribunals may be established for Cambodia and East Timor.

This unprecedented assault upon the impunity of the powerful, and the attempt to impose some form of justice (whether or not successful), are emerging as new benchmarks of international human rights at the cusp of the new century—along with growing pressure on governments to acknowledge past wrongdoing in the hope of creating a more just future.

I began this book almost by chance in the spring of 1996, while on a trip to Japan that had been organized for other reasons. Since I was there, I decided to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both wellsprings of twentieth-century history and imagination. I was curious to know how the nuclear bombings of civilians were remembered by the Japanese themselves. The Canadian embassy in Tokyo kindly put me in touch with a number of key people, who led me to individuals such as Hitoshi Motoshima, the former mayor of Nagasaki, who was shot at for daring to suggest that Emperor Hirohito carried responsibility for Japanese warcrimes. But when I boarded the train for the south, I did not know that I was embarking upon the first stage of a three-year journey around the world and a personal encounter with the unsettled history of several nations, or that I was about to meet countless unforgettable people whose experiences would affect me deeply and shape my view of the past.

I became quickly aware that what I was learning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki meshed effortlessly with my long interest in the way collective memory develops and what happens to people who find themselves excluded from the narrative, and I began to wonder where else a carefully restructured, or selective, view of history might have patterned the present, especially after calamitous events. There were, I realized, dozens of situations in the world to choose from: the Troubles of Northern Ireland; the still-unresolved partition between India and Pakistan; the transition in Iran from autocracy under the shah to theocracy under the imans; the (certainly temporary) power vacuum in post-Soviet Russia; unassimilated Nazi memory in Austria; the long, unfinished lurch from Maoism to capitalism in China; and the human anguish brought about by Argentina’s punto final amnesty for the perpetrators of the Dirty War . . . to name just a few. Above all, I wanted to explore the way that certain critical events have been remembered—or deliberately not remembered, as the case may be—and the effects on ordinary people whose experiences may, or may not, have been included in the official narratives of their nations.

The storyline of the book presented itself to me in a natural way: I decided to embark on a journey to explore first-hand the underpinnings of national remembrance. My subject would be the effects of war and its approximations—civil conflict, repression and mythmaking—seen from different angles. In addition to the usual library research, my sources would be my own experience as a writer fascinated by how, and why, societies redirect their course over time, and the people I would meet.

My first questions were, How to proceed? How not to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the subject? I had deliberately chosen the most direct path, and the most intimate, which was to place myself alongside other curious travellers who have, over the centuries, explored the world through encounter with their fellows as well as by study, hoping that my long involvement with some of the issues would cast light on experience. I knew that in these voyages I would always be the outsider, always looking in, and from the start I was aware that I might be seen as an intruder. I could only hope that empathy and my genuine desire to understand the often bewildering patterns of national memory, with its fabrications, justices and injustices, would give me the access I needed.

The outsider enters the scene from a peculiar angle, which is why I have not included my own country, Canada—although, when it comes to historical memory, we have no shortage of material—from the endemic mating dance of Quebec and the rest of Canada to my country’s shameful treatment of its native peoples, which is only now being addressed in small ways. At home, I am always a potential actor in events: either actively, if I participate in the ongoing national discussion, or passively if I do not, in the sense that to abdicate in a democracy is itself a political act. Although all of us carry our baggage of personal biases with us wherever we go, the view from outside appears to present a less cluttered perspective with fewer starting prejudices.

I decided too that I would travel alone, since tandem travel is better suited to tourism, in my experience, and solo travel would, I hoped, allow me to focus on the people I met, without mediation or distraction. But en route I did make occasional mistakes in judgment, as when I found myself in a dangerous situation in the destroyed village of Ahmići near Sarajevo.

Having settled on my mode of exploration, I then laid out my historical itinerary. First, because it is inescapably the most powerful legacy of the twentieth century, my starting point would be the unsettled history of the Second World War, a period I was especially drawn to. Japan, France and Germany have not yet overcome the fallout from that crisis, now so long ago, although each has tried to manage its history of defeat in its own way: by denial, in the case of Japan; by myth-making, in the case of France; and by a painful complex of different approaches, in the case of Germany. In each instance I asked myself, How has remembrance been shaped, and what is preventing reconciliation after so many decades? Then I moved on to another theme of our time—a subject that lives at the heart of fin-de-siècle consciousness: the continuing conflict between the white and black races. In the West, this clash has lethally afflicted two nations: the United States, which has not recovered from the tragedy of having instituted chattel slavery on its democratic soil, and South Africa, which has tried to confront its apartheid past more directly. As the third motif of my historical journey, I chose to explore the way war can be used as a catalyst for national identity, and I picked the Jews and the Serbs as examples: the Jews have made the remembrance of a historical tragedy a central focus of their contemporary religious identity, though not without internal conflict, while Serb intellectuals and politicians consciously manipulated their national stories to serve deadly ends, victimizing their own people as well as millions of others.

Finally, I set out to probe the role justice can play in pacifying unreconciled historical memory—by visiting two geographical places of tribunals and judicial accountability for international crimes. Like so much else in my intellectual and emotional life, I date my interest in the post-war Nuremberg Tribunal, and the questions that were raised there about what constitutes apt punishment for deeds that penetrate to the core of our humanity, to that long-ago day when I happened upon Natzweiler-Struthof. I was determined to investigate the rebirth of Nuremberg in the new United Nations courts that were created as a response to war crimes committed in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda and, later, Kosovo—and to confront questions about collective guilt, forgiveness and forgetting that have troubled me for years.

As I researched and wrote Long Shadows, the subject grew ever larger in my mind. I was touched by the openness of people to a foreign writer they had never met—and by their willingness to try to articulate the connections between their individual experiences and the complicated histories of their nations. Because a rare kind of intimacy seemed to occur in many of these encounters, the book gradually became even more personal than I had originally intended it to be. It has become a diary and a journal, as well as the story of several countries and a reflection on the way history is made and remembered.

A Word about Sources

I read voraciously in preparation for each of my trips, and the titles of the books I found most helpful can be found in the chapter notes, but the following sole-authored works also deserve a prominent mention. They are Between Vengeance and Forgiveness by Martha Minow; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson; Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, by Michael Ignatieff; The Faces of Injustice, by the late Judith N. Shklar; Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law, by Mark Osiel; Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character, by David H. Jones; The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, by Ian Buruma; The Unmasterable Past, by Charles S. Maier; the brilliantly argued Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action, Race, and American Values by Christopher Edley Jr.; and an insightful book that I have returned to often over recent years, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, by Ervin Staub. Every one of these works, and many others that I have noted in the text, were crucial to my understanding of individual countries and to the concept of memory. My only regret is that Peter Novick’s fine book The Holocaust in American Life appeared too late for me to incorporate it into my research on that topic. I have also alluded to, and occasionally quoted from, my own earlier works on the theme of history, politics and memory, especially The Garden and the Gun: A Journey inside Israel; Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair; The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain; and an article titled Pulling the Threads Together, published in Beyond Imagination: Canadians Write about the Holocaust, edited by Jerry S. Grafstein.

Memory and the Second World War

1

The Stone of Sisyphus

Germany

What is past is not dead, it is not even past.

We cut ourselves off from it, we pretend to be strangers.

– CHRISTA WOLF, A Model Childhood

A stench of sewage pollutes the streets of East Berlin; exposed wires dangle ominously; uncollected garbage spills into sunless, dilapidated courtyards. The graffiti scrawled across walls speaks of uneasy transition—layer upon layer of a still-stratified past. Nazi lives here! accuses one notice painted on an apartment building. Attack fascism! orders another. Defend squatters’ rights! commands a third. The developers from the West are moving in, juxtaposing restored nineteenth-century facades and modern cubes of steel and glass with the decrepit cinderblock construction of the German Democratic Republic. Some of the residents are angry.

But the development frenzy cannot silence the airy whisperings of unquiet ghosts that can be heard, should one care to listen, in the hundreds of empty spaces that pockmark the city: in memory holes that have never been plugged, either by choice, in order to mark the terror of the Nazi era, or by default, as in the East, where the continuing presence of bombed-out structures and vacant lots was for decades useful antifascist propaganda.

It is these whisperings I have come to hear, these memory holes I have come to explore. And finally, after months of planning, I have arrived in the country that has for years been a source of personal uneasiness. Ever since I first realized the magnitude of the Holocaust and understood my own life as part of a swell of survival—I am the daughter of Canadian-born Jewish parents—Germany has felt forbidding and ominous. In the 1960s, when I was inexperienced and ignorant of history, I crossed the border from France into Germany several times to visit Freiburg, in the region of the Black Forest—a city that charmed me. That was before I visited Natzweiler-Struthof, the Nazi death camp in the nearby Vosges mountains; in any case, I was young enough then to feel closer to the Brothers Grimm than to Auschwitz. And I had not been back in the country since.

Now it is 1997, and I have learned over the years, in excruciating detail, what happened here between 1933 and 1945 and struggled to understand how and why. Part of this exploration has been about memory—about how calamitous events, such as the Holocaust, are shaped in the collective story of perpetrator nations, how ordinary people remember and what they tell their children. I have come here with the understanding of one who has studied the facts and now seeks deeper answers.

My plan is to start in Berlin—in East Berlin, to be precise, where the old Jewish community of the city used to live—and then to travel in search of the memories and the whisperings. Here in Germany, as elsewhere, some of my itinerary is planned and some is not. People tell me things. Or I just follow my nose.

Memory: the pre-war Jews of Berlin—once the centre of German-Jewish life—were deported long ago, but in an indefinable way their vibrant world remains both occult and palpably evident. Thanks to Joel Levy, a former American diplomat who now heads the German branch of the Ronald E. Lauder Foundation, which funds the reconstruction of Jewish life in Europe, I am staying in a partially rebuilt, once-famous building, the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse in the erstwhile East, that feels to me like the epicentre of that peculiar ambiguity. When Levy invited me to stay here, in one of two or three available guest rooms, I accepted with alacrity: I thought—rightly, as it turns out—that I would not get much closer to the past than in a place that housed so many ghosts.

The Neue Synagoge was built in 1866, with thirty-two hundred seats, and for seventy years this stately palace-like synagogue embodied the excitement and bourgeois pride of the new Jewish Reform movement, which had embraced the modernity of the Enlightenment by casting off the embarrassing, outmoded forms of orthodoxy that differentiated Jews from their fellow Germans. In the Neue Synagoge, Jews practised their religion just as their compatriots, who happened to be Lutherans, practised theirs. They were proud Germans of the Jewish persuasion. But the synagogue was destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and for the next fifty years, the charred ruins were left untouched by the East German government (along with other destroyed buildings), as presumed evidence of Western, fascist brutality: until 1988, that is, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) entered its final death throes. That was the year Communist Party chief Erich Honecker promised to help finance the reconstruction of the famous landmark. (Since he was about to leave for a visit to the United States, he might have been hoping the gesture would help him overseas.) The government in Bonn also contributed funds, and the building’s foundations were redone. Then, on November 9, 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht—the night the yellow-red flames of burning Jewish homes and businesses illuminated the Berlin night sky—a commemoration was held at the partially reassembled site.

That the reconstruction was merely partial seems deliberate and symbolic—like a Japanese haiku that forces the reader, or in this case the visitor, to imagine the rest. Half recalled, blurred, wispy, irretrievable, the building is here yet not quite here; it exists, and parts of it are once again in use, but it is now manifestly a museum and a pointer to the past. There is also a notable police presence, which unintentionally evokes both past and present. Every time I leave or re-enter the building, I pass through a metal detector and show my passport to the same suspicious-looking guards, who seem never to recognize me. A plaque to Kristallnacht on the outside wall attracts a steady stream of passersby: they stop to read with looks of consternation on their faces. Before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, few West Germans knew this place.

For an entire week, I seem to be the only person rattling around the upstairs halls—but nighttime is the worst: it is unnerving to be alone in a museum of missing people. I grow addicted to watching television and channel surfing. One evening I happen upon a U.S.-made documentary about unapprehended war criminals living in Canada.¹ Is this one of the first features on this subject to be shown to the citizens of the former East Germany? I wonder. I sit ramrod straight on my chair, as the nation that invented Nazism is informed that my country has one of the worst records in the Western world for permitting the immigration of thousands of escaping Nazis and their East European collaborators after the war.² Of course, Canada is not the only country to have its shameful record belatedly confronted: evidence of iniquity has surfaced over the last decade in a dozen new places, as the terrible effects of the Holocaust ripple anew across the world. Even bland Switzerland has had to struggle publicly with its hidden legacy of appropriated Nazi gold.

Alone in my silent museum, I imagine the thousands of empty seats looming in the darkness just down the hall. They have been replaced just where they used to be—wordlessly memorializing their missing occupants. Inside these new-old walls, the past already feels too close for comfort.

In the streets that surround the synagogue are empty spaces containing nothing but remembered forms. Inexplicably, my guide and I peer into such places and talk about what used to be. She is Lara Dämmig, an East Berliner in her early thirties, who works for Joel Levy, and she knows this part of the city well, because, as a Jew who has returned to the faith since communism evaporated, she has spent a lot of time exploring such evocative sites. We walk together to a vacant lot, where the internationally renowned artist Christian Boltanski has created a conceptual work titled Missing House. Plaques engraved with the names of all those who lived in the vanished apartment house until 1945, and their dates of residence, have been hung on the outer walls of the buildings on either side of the emptiness: Jewish residencies ended in 1942.

We walk up the street, across a block, where one of the buildings once housed a day-care centre for Jewish children, then down the next street to a still-extant building with a memorial plaque to the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish school he founded there in the late eighteenth century. During his lifetime, Mendelssohn was held up as a model by liberal Christians who admired what they saw as his attempt to help his fellow Jews Germanize themselves and assimilate. But Mendelssohn rejected the idea of total assimilation as culturally impossible—and undesirable—in that it condoned the disappearance of Jewish identity. For him, the ideal of equality, which was inherent in the emancipation of the Jews, meant the right of the minority to continue its practices within an environment of liberal pluralism. What mattered was the willingness of people to live together with reason as the yardstick of the worthy life.

This was not to be, even during his own lifetime. Mendelssohn engaged in a searing public dispute with his friend Johann Lavater, a theologian who had challenged him to convert to Christianity. Afterwards, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and one can only speculate that part of his despair might have come from Lavater’s suggestion that he would never be a real German as long as he remained a Jew.

From 1829 until 1945, the empty space next door to the one-time school was occupied by a Jewish home for the aged; then during the Nazi era (and before it was bombed), the now-invisible building was utilized by the Gestapo as a holding depot for neighbourhood Jews awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. The apartment dwelling immediately adjacent survived the war. At such close proximity, it is impossible to believe that the tenants neither saw nor heard what was happening to fifty-five thousand of their neighbours, which is the number of people dispatched from these premises. At least ten storeys of multiple windows look down on the spot.

Next to the vanished home for the aged is the largest of the disappeared places: the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, in use from 1672 until 1827. Mendelssohn was buried here, along with many of his contemporaries, but these dead died twice. The graveyard was levelled by order of the Gestapo in 1943, and now it is a featureless expanse of land shaded by trees. Complete oblivion—with one exception: the site of Mendelssohn’s grave was remembered and restored. On the crushed, levelled earth there stands a single memorial stone inscribed with the name and life dates of the man who once personified the dream of integration.

But while the vanished Jews of Berlin whisper to me of their fate by seeming to inhabit the shadowy empty spaces, the architecture of what remains of the recent Communist era openly proclaims its inherent fakery. Lara and I hail a taxi on Oranienburger Strasse and get out at Husemannstrasse, a thoroughfare that was rebuilt in the 1980s. It is just one outwardly restored street, large enough for the leader of the people to parade along, but the restoration was surface only. A decade later, the underlying decay has eaten through the cracks of the flimsy facades, and the roofs along the show street are in an advanced state of collapse. We continue to the famous Brandenburg Gate, where history and memory are on sale for a mark or two. Once, Adolf Hitler rode between these imperial columns as emperor of the Thousand-Year Reich; now Turkish pedlars hawk kitsch: GDR police caps (someone has patched on the red star insignia for added effect), Russian fur hats and Russian nesting dolls. A niche inside the Gate houses yet another piece of the unprocessed past: in tribute to the 1989 reunification of the two Germanys, an earnest lady presides over a non-denominational Room of Silence, inviting all who pass by to reflect on universal peace.

Down the road, defaced and as ruined as Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias, sits the former parliament of Erich Honecker. From here emanated the orders to shoot would-be fugitives scaling the Berlin Wall; from here the Stasi secret police kept tabs on everyone, with the help of everyone. Now graffiti sprout over abandoned stones.

Just over the Wall, the municipality of West Berlin had constructed a large, ultra-modern glass building facing east. Its message was obvious enough: enslaved people, look and see what we have! The Honecker government responded by erecting apartments that blocked the view and by designing maps for schoolchildren that showed East Berlin—and white space where the Western part of the city ought to have been.

The Nazis and the GDR, memory holes and histories overlapping. Fraternal ghosts of the twentieth century, still disconnected, still unabsorbed.

Lara has embraced Judaism, but without most of the trappings of organized religion, and she has not revived the wishful hopes of Moses Mendelssohn. Unlike the great philosopher, she describes herself as a Jew living in Germany—not as a German Jew, an identity she adamantly rejects. In 1989, she avoided the joyful reunification celebrations because, in her words, the event was too German. It made her uncomfortable.

"But you are German," I say.

She looks unhappy. Well, yes, of course . . . No, that’s not right! I am a Jew living in Germany.

Do others feel as you do?

"Yes. There are the Germans and there are the Jews, but even the Germans don’t like to be German. They call themselves ‘Europeans’ or I don’t know what. To be German is very hard."

Do you have ‘German’ friends?

Of course! Lots! She looks at me as though I have asked something impossibly stupid. I was born here!

I learn that Lara’s ambivalence is not unique when she takes me to meet her friend Eva Nickel, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose first husband and two small children, age five and seven, were deported to Auschwitz. After the war, Eva’s mother married the son of the brave Catholic family that had rescued her and tried to save her daughters. That young man was Eva’s father, and he had insisted that she be raised as a Jew.

Eva’s apartment is not far from the Neue Synagoge, where she works in community administration. And an extraordinary apartment it is, with a colourful history. The building was constructed by her great-grandfather in 1865, with money that had come into the family in an unusual way: an ancestor had purportedly saved the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia, in the mid-eighteenth century. According to what Eva calls the family legend, the king fell off his horse one day during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and was lying, injured, surrounded by his enemies, when Eva’s ancestor—a soldier named Moses Isarch—rushed to the scene and lifted the monarch onto an ox cart. Isarch covered him with dry grass so he would not be seen and slowly walked off the field, with the king hidden under the camouflage. Isarch was well-known in Berlin Jewish circles—he was, says Eva, a friend of Moses Mendelssohn’s; and Frederick, like Mendelssohn, was a leading exponent of the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. In fact, his insistence on religious toleration widely affected the intellectual currents of his age. So the king was intent on recompensing the Jew who had saved him, and he paid Isarch very well—enough to allow him to establish a foundation of sorts. When Isarch died, he stipulated in his will that the boys of the family were to receive an inheritance, in order to establish themselves in a profession, and the girls were to receive money for a dowry—but only if they married Jewish men. He could see what was happening, says Eva. All the Jews were going to Church and becoming baptized. So he said the girls had to continue the Jewish line.

A charming story—whether true or not—that reminds me, as I listen, of the long, complex past of Jews in Germany. Frederick the Great—an enlightened despot—set the contemporary standard for religious tolerance. Eventually, reflecting the new ideals of rationality that were sweeping across Europe after the French Revolution, German Jews were emancipated into full citizenship towards the end of the eighteenth century. But there was also a particularly brutal history of anti-semitism in Germany that stretched back to the Middle Ages:³ some of the worst massacres of so-called well-poisoners (during the plague years of the fourteenth century, Jews were accused of infecting the water supplies) took place in this community. On an icy February day in 1349, nine hundred Jews were hurled into bonfires in the city of Strasbourg alone. The blood libel (according to which, Jews were accused either of killing a Christian child in order to mock the Passion of Jesus, or of desecrating the consecrated host), though actively bruited about in many European countries, was nowhere more volatile than in Germany, where indelible images of murderous Jews cleaved to memory and folklore. Emancipation allowed German Jews to enter the modern world, where they prospered in the liberal professions and in business, but their very success raised philosophical problems for many people, as well as the usual jealousies. The social philosopher Hannah Arendt put it best when she wrote that the breakdown of the feudal order [gave] rise to the new revolutionary concept of equality, according to which a ‘nation within a nation’ could no longer be tolerated.⁴ Although many of the Jews rushed to convert to Christianity (a reality that Eva’s great-grandfather had tried to counter in his own family), baptism was not obligatory, creating the difficult contradiction Arendt attempted to analyse. It was hardly a wonder that Moses Mendelssohn had had a nervous breakdown after his debate with Johann Lavater.

They were a middle-class family. Before the war, Eva’s mother was a milliner, and her husband owned a transport company, but when the persecutions began in the 1930s, after the election of Adolf Hitler, they tried to leave for Argentina, sending their rugs and furniture to London in preparation for the sea voyage. But their passports were not right, says Eva, and the money they had paid for them was stolen. So they stayed in Berlin.

In February 1942, her mother’s husband was rounded up by the Gestapo at his workplace and deported. In desperation, Eva’s mother asked a Catholic family—friends—for help. They agreed and took the two little girls to their country house forty kilometres outside Berlin. Eva’s mother stayed in the city, cleaning the houses of loyal, tight-lipped friends to pay the children’s board; then, when the situation became too dangerous for her to continue living in the Jewish neighbourhood, she moved in with another gentile friend: this woman’s son became her future husband, Eva’s father.

Every weekend, she put herself at risk by removing the yellow star that identified her as a Jew and taking the train to see her daughters, until the day in 1944 when she found them missing. They had been denounced to the Gestapo by someone who had seen them playing and was suspicious.

The apartment had somehow escaped both the bombings and appropriation by the Nazis, and, once again it became the locus of family life—although the family was now reconfigured. Eva was born in 1948, and she tells me that during her years at school, no one, including her teachers, ever talked to her about what had happened to her family. Here in East Germany, everyone was considered a victim of fascism, but some of us had more status than others, she says with an ironic smile. The Communist fighters were the most important and Jews were the least. I had been reading about this: the state-run war museums had glorified the anti-fascist struggle led by the Party, but the deportation and murder of civilians was barely acknowledged. It was the mid-1980s before a stone commemorating Jewish victims was added to the memorial at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. East Germans never thought much about what happened during the Nazi era, except that it was fascist and now we were socialist, she continues. We lived in a new world, and everything from the past was pushed away. This is what we were taught, and people from my generation heard and believed the same messages as their parents. But in their hearts they knew, we all knew. What happened during the Nazi time drew a line between Germans and Jews, and this is still true today.

She is as fully integrated into her society as any other East German; in fact, she used to teach socialist economics to high school students. But remembering my earlier conversation with Lara, I’m burning to ask a question: Are you a German? I ask her.

She shrugs and laughs. I guess I am whether I like it or not; this is my language and my culture. But really, I live in two worlds. Even today Germans are very uncomfortable about Jews. They are very interested, and things that seem Jewish are fashionable right now, but obviously they have never met any. I was at a birthday party in Kiel recently, and when I told people I am now the director of the Jewish Centre in Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin, there was a long silence. Everyone looked down into their glasses. I find I have to learn to read faces, because when people hear I am Jewish, they are very careful about what they say, and it isn’t natural anymore. This is typical. There is a chasm between Germans and Jews in spite of all the fake interest in Jewish culture. Between us lies the Holocaust.

It was 1992 before Eva could put her past to rest. Her mother never spoke about what had happened during the war, but for the rest of her life she talked obsessively about her two lost daughters. And she screamed at night. Mother was very ill in the last six months of her life in 1987. She was always thinking they were coming back. She kept calling for them—Ruth! Gittel! Her last words were their names. From that point, I had to find them, and find peace for them, and for me. I went to Auschwitz. It was terrible. I stood in the gas chamber and beside the oven, but it was not good for me. Then I decided to go to Israel—to Yad Vashem, where they have all the names of the victims. By then we were allowed to travel, so I went, and I found their names. The man there was so nice to me. He said, ‘You must go into the memory garden for children.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I will go.’ I went inside the garden, and I felt very peaceful there—still and peaceful—for the first time. And from this moment I felt they were finally at peace, and so was I. I had found their resting place.

I finish my cup of tea in near silence, so heavy are the shared feelings in the room. It is not until we have said goodbye and I am walking down the stairs to the ground floor of the building that I allow the sadness to wash over me: sadness for Eva, for her suffering mother, for the lost children. I tune my ear to the whispering voices of the dead and think about the layers of history in this ancient sector of the city.

Although no one seems able to explain to me exactly why, the moneyed chic that has invaded East Berlin since reunification includes Jewish chic, and it is fashionable to approximate, or more realistically perhaps, appropriate, Jewishness. This is true all over the country, but nowhere more so than in the eastern sector of the capital. In a land where few people under the age of fifty-five have ever met a Jew, Jewishness is the latest fad.

On Oranienburger Strasse, one can dine in the Café Mendelssohn, or the Café Zilberstein (someone researched the restaurants’ original pre-war names); and there are dozens of klezmer bands composed entirely of German Christians playing to audiences of German Christians. Lara had told me she found all this disconcerting. They are swallowing Jewish culture without any understanding or real interest, she complained. The apparent fascination with things Jewish does have a strange feel to it. On my first evening in Berlin, I had attended a concert at the cultural centre attached to the Neue Synagoge that included Maurice Ravel’s famous Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The audience was mostly gentile Berliners, and they looked visibly stricken as they listened.

Many Germans try to attend every Jewish event, said Joel Levy of the Ronald E. Lauder Foundation, when I questioned him after the event. They send their children to parochial Jewish schools and Jewish summer camps. They come to the synagogue and the centre whenever they can. They can’t seem to get close enough.

"But the Neue Synagoge is a museum," I said, feeling perplexed.

That tells its own story, doesn’t it? replied Levy. I don’t claim to understand, but they seem to be looking for comfort.

One evening, curious to observe post-Holocaust religious life, I attend a synagogue service in West Berlin, and, since the environment is Orthodox, I am banished with the rest of the women to the back of the room, behind a latticed screen. One person there seems more devout than the rest: she wears a headscarf, is praying intensely and seems to be alone. I approach her after the service, and she tells me this is her first visit to a synagogue. I ask why she has come, and she replies that she recently had a dream in which it was revealed that part of her family had been Jewish, and through which she understood that she personally carries the guilt for the deeds of her gentile relatives. Since then she has prayed constantly to God to forgive her family and studied Judaism. Now it is time to participate in Jewish religious services. I feel the guilt of my family and I know I must make things right again, she says earnestly.

Do you think some of the Jews will eventually accept Jesus Christ? she asks me.

Highly unlikely, I reply.

I just feel things in my bones, she sighs with a sad little smile.

This confused, passionate appropriation of Judaism is, it seems, not unusual. Several people tell me about the case of a convert to Judaism who had been taking a university degree in Jewish studies. The woman grew more and more agitated at the makeup of the class—her teachers and fellow students were all gentile—and the secular, historical slant of the course, until one day she exploded and shot her professor. No gentile should be allowed to teach the Talmud, she declared self-righteously to the police.

The woman who has been running the Jewish adult education and culture program in Berlin for ten years, and is in a position to know about such things, thinks gentile interest in things Jewish is on the increase. Germans queue up for three hours to get into our Hebrew classes! Nicola Galliner tells me incredulously when I meet her at the Jewish Centre. "They say they want to read the Hebrew press in the original or that they’re considering a trip to Israel. We’ve planned other events for a hall that holds six hundred and had more than a thousand people turn up. They are well-meaning people; most of them are middle class and educated, but the interest really does seem disproportionate. The smallest event in our tiny Jewish community—for example, hiring a new rabbi—often gets on the front page of the larger circulation newspapers in the city and across the country.

You know, a lot of Germans are looking to Jews for answers, but this is not the right place to look. They need to go into themselves, to look at what their parents or their grandparents did. Sometimes I think they are searching for peace of mind, but you can’t ask the people you tried to kill to deal with problems you might have because you tried to kill them!

Her dismissive attitude seems to confirm Lara’s rejection of her German identity. Neither of these women wants a close connection with Germans, nor do they want Germans, who may be feeling guilty and needing comfort, to come to them.

But Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz, respectively director and curator of the Neue Synagoge and the attached centre, understand the surge of interest differently. In Germany we commemorate the concentration camps, and every school child sees terrible photos, Schütz tells me. "The Holocaust seems to be everywhere, all the time, on television, in the newspapers, but there is a still a mysterious prejudice because most people have never seen a living Jew. So they come to us with very odd questions about kashrut [kosher-ness] and circumcision and just about everything else."

Chana uses the word they, but her name was Christiane before her conversion to Judaism. Born in 1956, she was, unlike most Germans, the daughter of a family that had had a great deal of contact with Jews: her father, Klaus Schütz, was mayor of Berlin from 1967 to 1977 and Germany’s ambassador to Israel from 1977 to 1981.⁵

People see the centre and the synagogue as living memorials, says Hermann Simon. They bring us things—boxes of photographs documenting their lives—because they think our archives are the right place for them. People come from America asking us to find out what happened to their relatives—yes, even after all this time. We have two researchers working on tracing, but of course it is twenty-five years too late for most of this work. Just yesterday a woman who was born in Berlin in 1935 came in looking for her real mother, who was Jewish. It’s sad. Sometimes we get people who are embarrassed, who say, ‘I had a neighbour, and I’ve always wondered what happened to him, so now I’m retired and I have more time . . .’ I suppose this is a place where it is relatively comfortable for people to come and speak about the past. We keep learning more about how people acted and lived during the Nazi period.

Until we arrived on the scene in 1995, only philo-semitic gentiles and the churches provided information about the Jewish experience. Now the Jewish perspective is being heard for the first time, Chana adds.

The Neue Synagoge and the attached centre have been open to the public for just two years, but already 350,000 people have come to the half-reconstructed building on Oranienburger Strasse to seek information or to see the permanent exhibition called Teach Them to Remember.

Has anyone come here to confess? I ask.

No, snaps Simon. We don’t want those people. Never. Never. This is a problem.

But how would you react if it happened?

"This is not the right place," he repeats, closing the lid on the subject.

Germans and Jews living in Germany. No reconciliation, as far as I can see. More than fifty years after the war, the new generations are shadowboxing with memories that seem unassimilable to both Jews and gentiles, and the standoff appears to be deepening, as repentant Germans try, in growing numbers, to atone for the deeds of their parents and grandparents, and Jews become increasingly uncomfortable with their entreaties and their appropriation of Jewish space. I think about this as I leave Chana and Hermann’s office. Is it ever possible for the living to forgive on behalf of the dead? Is it right that they even be asked? The moral dilemma is searing, for without forgiveness, how will future generations conduct themselves? On the other hand, some lines cannot be transgressed. As Hermann Simon implied, certain absolutions cannot—will not—be made.

Remembrance of the Holocaust is multi-layered, and the restoration of memory has been long and slow, but there is, at least, movement now—unlike during the post-war decades, when the Nazi experience was rarely talked about. After 1945, Germans put away the past; it was the start of a new era, time to move on, to democratize with the help of the victorious Allies, to develop a viable economy, to approach the rest of Europe as a partner rather than as an antagonist. The Cold War was in high gear, and some former Nazis were welcome anti-Communist collaborators. Furthermore, although some Germans dismissed the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945–46 as victors’ justice, the international tribunal could also be viewed as a means of catharsis. Hitler and his henchmen were dead or duly punished: it was possible to pretend that the slate had been wiped clean, as the French did after the war. History could start anew.

But with whom? The post-war Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), under its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, needed a judiciary, but most judges had served the Nazi cause. They had condoned atrocities, sentenced prisoners who had been kidnapped and deported from occupied countries to death, tolerated the systematic murder of the infirm and backed the notorious Nuremberg Laws that deprived Jews of civil rights and citizenship. The Nazi judiciary had actually run its own concentration camps in the Emsland region and in Hamburg-Fuhlsbuttel, but after the war they were the only game in town.

The FRG also needed experienced bureaucrats, but having performed their appalling duties with efficiency and expertise, they, too, were tainted. The same was true for the diplomatic corps and the military: almost everyone had an unsavoury past. So, for practical reasons (few who had lived through the Hitler years in Germany would have escaped indoctrination), and because historical amnesia was a painless and easy option, so-called de-nazification was (at best) half-hearted, and people sentenced to jail were released as soon as possible in order to reassume their duties. In the immediate post-war years, the working infrastructure of the new FRG relied almost entirely on men and women whose personal histories included perpetrating injustice, and sometimes genocide.

Because this was a well-understood (if little-discussed) fact of life, West Germany also protected itself from itself with a new constitution called the Basic Law. The Law, first promulgated in 1949, opened with a statement of unconditional individual rights. It sought to curtail the possibility of unlimited, overly centralized power through division and control, somewhat along American lines—and it rejected isolationism born of nationalism by setting rules for a co-operative foreign policy. Recognizing that the war had been waged against the Jews of Europe, the new FRG also adopted the principle of reparations for survivors.

The new constitution became a bible for millions of Germans who were afraid their country might repeat its history (just as the new postwar constitution of Japan is a bible for pacifists in that country who fear a new rise of militarism), and it remains the point of reference for public intellectuals whenever there is a hint of crisis. But the learning from history that produced Germany’s Basic Law seemed mostly institutional, because, at a popular level, the past continued to be suppressed. Although schoolchildren had general information about their country’s recent past, many young Germans were ignorant of their parents’ involvement with Nazism. At the family level, a deep silence reigned.

Sometimes the ambiguities of memory and forgetfulness bordered on the grotesque. The crematorium at Dachau was opened in the late 1940s—as a bar—and there were few memorials at any of the former concentration camps beyond anodyne, generalized inscriptions reading: To the Dead: 1933–45, or In Memory of the Victims of National Socialist Tyranny. Such bloodless dedications meant little, for as Thomas Lutz, the director of the Memorial Museums department of the Topography of Terror Foundation has pointed out, Citizens probably tended to associate [such] monuments with the fallen soldiers from their town.

It took two decades before the first blows against silence were struck, and not surprisingly they came from the young. The anti-establishment revolution of the late 1960s in Germany was a part of the same movement that swept across other Western countries, as young people rejected the values of their parents, adult society and national institutions, believing that they could wipe out the past and kick-start history anew. But in Germany, the so-called generation gap had a special edge. Young people demanded to know what their fathers had done in the name of the führer; and when they found out, or (as was often the case) when their parents refused to answer, many families splintered apart. In schools and universities, some members of the traumatized second generation tried to redefine German identity in new ways. They rejected guilt in the absolute sense: born after the war, they had committed no act for which they could be condemned. In their idealism, they attempted to outline a new character for German society. If xenophobia and racism had led to the unimaginable, they would shun the values that had historically defined German nationhood.

Some of them committed themselves to personal reparation, often through their churches. The Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action reconciliation service for peace) campaign encouraged atonement in Germany, Poland and Israel by working with Holocaust survivors, restoring Jewish cemeteries and building synagogues, as well as caring for the handicapped—another group that had been targeted by Hitler’s regime. Others were literally unable to remain on German soil. Years before this visit to Germany, I had encountered a woman in New York City who had left Germany with her brother after they discovered their father was an unrepentant Nazi. The brother had immigrated to Israel. She worked for Aufbau, a German-language Jewish newspaper. And then there was Beate Klarsfeld who, with her French husband, Serge, became one of the world’s most notable Nazi hunters. I had met both of them in Paris in the mid-1980s, when I was researching my book on the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, whose capture in Bolivia and return to France they had planned and carried out. Beate was born in Berlin in 1939 to a conventional family who expected little of their daughter; in fact, she dropped out of school to become a secretary. But in 1960, she decided to take a year off to study in Paris, where she met Serge in a café. He was a Holocaust survivor, whose father had been ripped from the family in September 1943; she was a callow student who knew nothing about her country’s murderous history and was shocked to the core to learn.

She had never minimized responsibility by saying it could have happened anywhere; instead, she internalized the guilt of her parents’ generation and committed herself to restore my country’s honour, as she put it to me when we met. Arguing that it is impossible to turn a page of history until those responsible for monstrous crimes have been brought to account, she furiously attacked former Nazis who occupied important positions in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s—including then-chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, who had worked for Josef Goebbels as deputy director of radio propaganda for foreign countries. On November 7, 1968, she attended the Congress of Christian Democrats in Berlin. Conservatively dressed as a prim secretary with a notepad, she approached the podium just as the chancellor was about to give a speech. Nazi! Nazi! she screamed, publicly slapping his face. The congress dissolved in pandemonium, and Klarsfeld was sentenced to a term in jail. But the publicity was worldwide.

In 1970, Beate and Serge blocked the appointment of Ernst Achenbach, a member of the West German parliament, as the German representative to the European Commission in Brussels. Achenbach had lobbied to stop war crimes trials in Germany, with good reason: the Klarsfelds had unearthed documents proving that between 1940 and 1943, he had been engaged in the persecution and deportation of French Jews.

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld were responsible for dozens of dramatic actions over the years, but in Germany Beate’s passion was best understood by the angry young: by the late 1960s, thousands had joined the anti-Nazi crusade. The price she paid was family: her father was dead, but her mother was ashamed of her notorious daughter. Everything I have done is as a German who is not a Jew, Beate has made a point of saying.⁶

It was not until the ’68ers (as the younger generation called themselves) moved into positions of prominence that the process of restoring memory of the Nazi years began in earnest. The education curriculum was reformed: teaching about the Nazi era now included student visits to former concentration camps, and major memorials were created at sites of incarceration where atrocities occurred, many of them finally naming the Jews as uniquely targeted victims. Slowly, and against considerable conservative opposition, a reluctant acknowledgment of the depth and reach of Nazi collaboration within German society began to emerge, until by the 1980s the old view that the monsters of Hitler had been duly taken care of at Nuremberg, and that everyone else was a victim of National Socialism, had lost considerable ground. Karl Jaspers’s famous distinction of four decades earlier—that there is a difference between guilt, for which there is only individual culpability, and communal responsibility, for crimes that could not have been committed without a collective looking-away, shifted back into focus. On the other hand, as Lara Dämmig put it so bluntly, none of this made it any easier to be a German.

The foreign passengers on the open-air bus tour are snickering: Beautiful Berlin is a gigantic construction site. Cranes wave menacingly over rubble, men in hard hats shout above the din of machinery and the dust from a million crushed building stones clogs the air. The speculators have arrived in force, building for the future as Germany prepares to turn yet another page in its history. Bonn is about to relinquish its role as the seat of the federal government, and