Update Between Work

A quick update.  Things have been pretty quiet as I try to get some writing and editing done.  I write this sitting at an outdoor table at a corner cafe on a day that cannot decide between sunshine and haziness, feeling very European.

Last Sunday I did a nice long bike ride through Spandau, a town just west of Berlin, and beyond.  I basically just looked on the excellent Berlin atlas my landlady has in the apartment and decided I would ride through Spandau and try to make it to the Berlin Forest to the west of the town.   But riding through the very modern town center — with indoor mall, huge streets, etc. — I discovered signs for the old city of Spandau.  I was going to ride by but my eye caught a sign for Jüdenstrasse (Jews Street) and had to check it out.  (You must know me by now, dear reader.)  The few blocks of this old city boasted a collection of very cute medieval-esque buildings, most renovated, some painted wonderfully and many now housing things like Asian restaurants or ice cream or clothing shops or a place selling narguilas.  Some of the street signs for Jüdenstrasse explain that the name dates to the 14th century!  Amazing.  Jews lived here 800 years ago!  The Nazis changed the name of the street when they came to power.  Here is a photo (not by me) with one of the medieval buildings that caught my eye:

There is a big citadel in the middle of the Tegelsee (Tegel Lake), alongside which Spandau grew.  It is now a museum.  I rode over and was going to go in but there was an admission fee and I feel like I don’t want to do any touring without my wife or the kids.  One of the items of interest listed on the map at the entrance is “medieval Jewish grave stones” that were at some point discovered in the fortress walls.  I kept riding westward, hoping to reach the Berlin Forest some miles off, but the road I was on, getting finally into agricultural country (I could smell manure) and a big old airfield for zeppelins, ended and on another road I tried the bike path came to a stop.  Oh well.  I turned around.  Back at home I looked at my map and now know which way I have to go.  Perhaps next time.

Friday morning I did my more or less weekly laundromat visit.  My apartment has no washer or dryer.  The place I go to is three blocks away, recommended by my landlady.  The owners are an older German couple, very friendly.  They spent time living in Chicago and speak some English.  This morning the woman greeted me with a big “shalom!”  In the past we had broached Jewish topics, but I was little taken aback by this and answered her, I guess self-consciously, with “gut morgen.”  But after I finished with my load, between the washing and drying, running some quick errands, I felt remiss so I said “shalom” in leaving.  This opened up a flood of conversation.  She asked me if I will go to synagogue in the evening.  I said yes.  She asked which one.  I said whatever I said.  Then she wanted to know if they serve food and what kind.  So I explained a bit about my experiences with kiddushes at shuls erev shabbat, even mentioning the three-course meal they served at the Joachimstaler Strasse shul and my dinners with my Yemenite rabbi friend from the Passauer Strasse shul.  All this clearly delighted her.  She began talking about their Jewish friends in the neighborhood, one of whom was intermarried, with kids living in Israel, another man whom I should meet who knows all the laws, etc.  (It turns out the laundromat couple, both Berliners, are intermarried: he Catholic, she Protestant.  Her parents were already similarly intermarried.  Her father had been a soldier whom she never knew; she was a “vacation baby,” conceived when he was on vacation from the front — in WW2 obviously — and died in battle.)  The husband chimed in now, lamenting the fall away from religion and she agreed.  The young generation know nothing, don’t care, don’t know their heritage.  Anyway, we closed by agreeing what a mess the world is, with people not learning about each other and fearing-hating that which is unfamiliar.

I guess this is an example of philosemitism.  Indeed, it feels both strange yet intriguing to realize one is an exotic object-subject of interest, even attraction.  Though I have little evidence on which to go, it seems their curiosity, affection and attraction stems from genuine sentiment, perhaps feelings of guilt (here her father was a soldier in the Nazi war effort, whatever his politics) and even real regret and sadness over the intentional, brutal disappearing (as a transitive verb, as in Latin America) of Berlin multiculturalism.

Today, to sort of continue this train of thought, I met a French sociologist who is a friend or a friend from back home.  A child of Russian Jews, her research focuses on Jews in former Communist countries, especially East Germany, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).  Hence her frequent visits to Berlin.  She explained that once Germany split, many of the Jews in the DDR were or became fervent Communists.  Her theory is that this enabled them to escape the burden of grappling with the Holocaust and persecution as Jews.  As Communists they could participate in, indeed they often led the “new religion” (as she called it) of the DDR, anti-fascism.  Indeed, de-nazification proceeded far more successfully and devotedly in the DDR than in West Germany.  (Partly this was because blaming everything on the Nazis helped East Germans feel like victims rather than perpetrators and collaborators.)  In West Germany, as in the United States, anti-Communism reigned supreme, so that most scholars dismiss these Communist Jews as all being merely self-hating Jews.  Their children, on the other hand, born after the war, often became Jewish, even if only cultural Jews, as a form of rebellion.  But the crazy, complicated loyalties and identities of Jews in these nations goes so far beyond such simplistic black-or-white ideological categories.  A fascinating glimpse, a sobering reminder.  Obviously quite secular herself, she asked me if I was religious.  I answered and she said she would contact a friend of hers whom I might enjoy meeting, a 90-year old man, the former cantor of the Rykestrasse Synagogue, which had been in the former East Berlin side of the city.  Without a rabbi — Judaism, like all religion — was officially condemned, he was the one who held the community together, apparently obtaining personal and spiritual support from his colleagues in the evangelical churches.

I empathize with Alice in her meanderings through Wonderland.

 

New Things Come my Way

For kabbalat shabbat yesterday I went back to the Sephardic shul.  It has been a few weeks.  The Yemenite rabbi, actually the shul’s hazzan and the community shochet, greeted me warmly and invited me over for dinner, once again.  Together with two of his sons, the older one visiting from London where he studies at a yeshiva, we walked the few blocks to his apartment, saying hello and thank you to the two police guards outside his building.  Other guests had already arrived, two young haredim visiting from Israel, a German man who was likely a convert and an older man from an unknown background with his older daughter.  The drinks flowed, along with the rabbis stories.  Far into the meal a full-blown hasid showed up, with big peyot and kapote.  He promptly fell asleep at the table.  Various people presented niggunim and songs, some quite beautiful.

Our host said some things that really took me by surprise.  First, he told a sweet anecdote about his past, one of several that emphasized his shyness and provinciality.  He grew up on Achiezer, a moshav in Israel populated by Yemenites.  He taught the young kids.  One day he led them on a trip, his first venture beyond the moshav.  When the bus stopped at the moshav bus stop he was riveted with fear of the bus driver, the first person not from the moshav he had ever laid eyes upon.  Lacking a beard and peyos, the no-doubt secular Israeli bus driver terrified him.  He could only grasp the hand-rails by the vehicle’s front steps for what seemed an eternity, the driver staring at him incredulous, wondering why he doesn’t just get on already.

Then he told a tale about trying to take care of some business, I didn’t catch exactly what, in Israel, for which he had to go to some office in Lod.  Again, the gist was how clueless he was (and is) about the world, how his sister had to translate everything for him, even though he understood Hebrew.  At our dinner table, he was urging the two visiting haredim to lengthen their visit, even stay in Berlin.  No doubt he wants more sympatico company.  He praised the life here: you go to the store, everyone is quiet, you go to the bank, everyone is quiet, you get on the trains, everyone is quiet.  But he proceeded to say, explicitly, that if he ever moved back to Israel it would take him months to get used to the shouting, the meshuga’as, the balagan, if he ever could.  Here in Berlin everything is so quiet.  I was taken aback by this anti-zionist speech from such a traditional Jew, an Israeli, no less.

Today after davening I walked back to the Charlottenburg palace gardens to read, despite the threatening clouds.  It turns out there is a week-long festival of art, music and food in the square before the palace gate, sponsored by a beer company, of course.  It looked like many of the stands, in tents, were still being set up.   I read on a bench by the lake behind the palace until it began drizzling.  Walking back through where the festival was unfolding, I noticed a band playing on the music stage.  A local band, led by a female singer, performed a set of soul tunes, in English, despite the singer’s noticeable accent, including an admirable cover of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”  I walked home to eat something, as it was shabbes and I had no money for any of the variety of offerings from the food tents.  I returned at 7:00 for another band, this one playing very skilled salsa.  The AfroCuban woman singer of this band pattered on to the crowd in fast German.  The band absolutely rocked, very tight in the groove, with an awesome young drummer and equally talented lesbian bass player.  I stayed for both sets, dancing along happily, albeit alone, with the turned on and loosened up audience of Germans and others.

I enjoyed the setting of the magnificent, imposing palace in whose lap the event took place, the elite opulence of stolid classicism hosting this modern, populist excuse for consumption and entertainment.  But my eye kept returning, as the sky went from cloudy to clear and back again, eventually darkening, to the golden statue atop the green copper dome at the building’s center.  A nude woman stood balancing on one foot, holding to the side an unfurled fabric with one hand.  She is Fortune, as I read later in my guidebook, a replacement sculpture of the one destroyed in the Second World War.  All golden but unclothed, perched uneasily on a narrow globe at the dome’s peak, she struck me as rather awkward and vulnerable.  An apt visual metaphor indeed for Fortune, exactly why architects, sculptors, royalty and others put her at the top of buildings, where the eye is drawn as its gaze rises heavenward: to remind people of the fickleness of fortune.  But didn’t any of the royals or their artists notice this eternally awkward and vulnerable lady on top of the palace dome and worry for her and wonder why on earth we should all have to watch her always up there?  It seems an act of cruelty to force on her this perennial precariousness and moreover to expose her in such a state to everyone.

I walked home, soused with salsa rhythms still propelling my spirit.  I passed one of the ubiquitous street columns, some feet in diameter, on which advertisements and such are plastered.  This one seemed to be a guide to the surrounding streets and neighborhood, so I stopped to read it.  It was devoted to a painter who lived in this area, whose name I already forgot and can’t seem to find online.  Among the list of nearby buildings and sites of interest was a memorial to Otto Grüneberg, an anti-fascist activist, killed by the Nazi SA (paramilitary stormtroopers) when he was all of 23.  From what I could gather from the signage in the too-dark evening the neighborhood had voted against the Nazis in the election (I couldn’t tell which one).  Fearful of reprisal, the residents had organized voluntary self-protection watches.

Indeed, Fortune’s balance faces endless threats.

 

Another Berlin Shabbes

Last night I joined my Dutch rabbi friend and his wife for kabbalat shabbat at the same nearby Liberal shul we went to a few weeks past.  For aleinu they opened the ark so that the congregation could say the prayer with the torah scrolls present.  I’m not sure what the origin of this custom is.  I forgot to ask.  But it reminded me of something similar from last time we were at this shul on shabbes morning.  When the torah scroll was returned to the ark after being read from and the ark was about to be closed, all the people up on the bima filed across the ark from right to left and kissed each of the scrolls.  I also meant to ask about the origins of this custom but forgot.  I found it very sweet.

This afternoon I wanted to get out a bit before turning to the reading I needed to do for classes this coming week.  I happened to be looking in my Berlin guidebook, searching for the population of the city (3.4 million), and thought to look up the neighborhood in which I’m renting my apartment, Charlottenburg.  I read about the large park and Baroque formal garden behind the Charlottenburg Palace, which I guess I had read before but ignored.  It called this one of the picturesque parks in the city and a place Berliners love to stroll on weekends, so I headed there.  A 10-minute walk through a leafy, quiet neighborhood, I admired the sinuous Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) ironwork grills on the porches of some of the buildings.  Rain had already come once today but I had my rain jacket and figured I could always duck in somewhere if it began again.

I reached the enormous building, built by Prussian ruler Wilhelm Friederich for his wife Sophie Charlotte in the 1680s, and headed around the right side of the long wings added later to enlarge the place.  Ornamental trees in planters shaped in globes and cones bordered the paths parallel to the palace’s front and rear.  Behind the palace was laid out a strictly geometric Baroque garden, probably some 300 feet wide by 1000 feet long.

Schloss Charlottenburg garden. Photo by Juergen Hohmuth

The borders of the smaller units within the garden were made of tiny hedges perhaps 6″ high and 6″ wide, while similar hedges also made up the borders of various designs within these units, some shaped like fleurs de lis, others in circles, crowns, etc.  Along the main paths small conical evergreen trees stood sentry.  All over stand long rows of perfectly-spaced trees.  I think this is the first time I have ever seen such a garden first-hand, despite having seen many depicted in books.  The whole scene instilled in me a direct sense of the privileges of power and wealth.  Clearly the royals got a great view from out the back windows, especially from the upper floors.  Clearly their status enabled them to possess such large areas of land and play with it as they wished.  I also had to imagine the team of gardeners whose constant labor maintained such finery for the pleasure of their employers/masters, affording them a sense of nature mastered, controlled and shaped.  I couldn’t get out of my mind the feeling that this was all living confectionery.

The rear of the formal garden abutted a beautiful artificial lake, a series of wide steps cascading down to the water.  A gaggle of visitors stood or sat, including a pair of lovers, enjoying and contemplating.  The level closest to the water was claimed by a row of sunbathing ducks and two alert geese.

To the left of the formal gardens was a large set of symmetrical rectangles paralleling and matching their size in length but far wider.  These were bordered by 6′ hedges of trees so that the wide, amiable paths passed by enclosed rectangular patches of forest.  Somewhat wilder than the formal garden, but still domesticated.  I hope they had excellent games of hide and seek here.

I returned to the front of the palace via its left side.  Heading to the gate and front plaza, I noticed two separate wedding couples being photographed, the gorgeous grounds providing a most suitable setting.  Both grooms wore dark suits and pocket kerchiefs.  One bride wore an elaborate white gown, rather daringly low-cut, the other what I took to be a traditional Indian outfit with a patterned red scarf draped over her head.  The ornamental trees in front were full-size.

I walked by a separate front building and noticed that it was an art gallery, so I went in.  Called the Klein Orangerie, the long, high-ceilinged building was originally a greenhouse.  Abstract paintings by a contemporary Berlin woman artist adorned the capacious walls.  The woman sitting at a lone desk within explained, in broken English, that the building was still a greenhouse, where all the ornamental trees were stored through the long winters.  The gallery functioned only during the two summer months of the year, when the trees could safely be placed outside.  Kind of amazing.  She apologized as she slipped into Persian on occasion, as she told me, her English only slightly better than my German.  It had begun pouring in earnest now, so I reviewed the art once more.  Then I waited by the very tall outer and inner doors (large enough to accommodate moving trees).  Suddenly, first the one wedding couple, then the second flurried in from the rain, followed by their various photographers.  So there we were, all hoping to wait out the heavy rain.  Their photographers took advantage of the indoor setting to shoot more photos.  I watched, somewhat amused, at the incongruity.

Now about 20 wedding attendees rushed in as well, brushing off their suits, flustered.  The bride in the white gown looked particularly unhappy with the weather.  All were in elegant formal wear, including two girls, possibly 7 and 5, in frilly white dresses with ribbed white fur half-tops.  They moved toward the near short wall but got close enough to the paintings that the Iranian-German woman got up and chastised them.  One of the teenage girls (I could tell they were of Middle Eastern background) made a mocking noise, which raised the Iranian-German woman’s hackles.  She started giving it to them.  I thought things would get heated.  Calmer heads prevailed and one of the photographers herded the large party toward the center of the room for group shots.

A very blond woman stood next to a dark woman, both beautiful, both watching the door like me for a break in the downpour.  I asked them if they spoke English and asked if it was one wedding party or two.  They explained that there were two: they were friends of the Indian-looking bride and groom, who, they clarified, were Pakistani.  The other couple, they gestured toward the large party, were Turkish.  Both weddings were to take place today, they had just been doing the preliminary photo shoots.  I extended my congratulations.  The dark woman, Pakistani herself, I assume, said the bride was annoyed at the weather.

I said: “I’m Jewish.  According to the Jews, rain on your wedding day is considered a blessing.”

She, excitedly: “We think that too!”  And she turned to her blond friend and told her, in German, “Auch bei uns!”

I: “It’s a sign of fertility, fruitfulness.”  They liked that.  “Remind the bride,” I said, “it will make her feel better.”

I felt a little better, too, knowing of this hitherto-hidden Pakistani-Jewish commonality, a deep yet sly, no doubt global, spiritual effort to help assuage marrying couples from inclement-weather-induced sadness.  Eventually the rain let up enough for me to make an exit.  The Iranian-German woman had told me that the Villa Oppenheim, which I had passed on the way to the Palace, was a museum and was free.  I made my way there, since it was close by and the drizzle wouldn’t go away.  I meditated on the multi-ethnic scene of which I had been a part (myself a visiting New York Jew, after all) at the echt-Prussian Charlottenburg Palace.  I never saw information about the owners of the original Oppenheim house, a summer villa built in 1881, but I assume they were Jewish.  Now a museum devoted to the history of and art relating to the neighborhood, I took in the two floors of exhibits, paintings and photographs, mostly of Charlottenburg history and vistas.  One room housed objects and examples of crafts from the 19th century, including a good number of (local?) cookbooks.  One of the authors was named something Elias and I figured she must have been Jewish.  I scoured the signage, all in German, for pertinent information and eventually came across a sentence at the end of a brief biography that stated (if I recall correctly) that her son, who had fled the Nazis to Norway, was deported back and died in the Vernichtungslager Auschwitz.

Now there’s a good German word: Vernichtungslager.  Camp for Vernichtung.  To make something nicht, to make something not (exist).  None of the English equivalents I could conjure up on my walk home seemed to match it.  Elimination camp.  Termination camp.  Death camp.  Vernichting means literally to make into nothing.  To undo the existence of something.  Perhaps to nullify comes close in objective semantic meaning.  But it lacks all the connotations of the Nazi intentions the word both hides and drips.

With perverse incongruity a kaleidoscope of pasts and presents jostle against one another promiscuously.  I feel like I’ve written just this already here.  Forgive me, a victim of endlessly interlocking circles.  Another shabbes in Berlin.

 

Sharing Strawberries

Because the commuter train I take to and from Potsdam University stops at all three of the university’s campuses, its ridership is often overwhelmingly made up of students in their 20s or younger.  Coming home this evening, the section of the car in which I sat transported, in addition to me, some dozen or so people half my age.  A thin blond woman in jeans shorts and a sweatshirt chatted with two male friends.  After the train left the station, she took out from her backpack a plastic bag and unwrapped it to reveal a big plastic supermarket tin of large strawberries.  She selected one and began eating it.  Perhaps people were watching her and she had noticed.  I was even going to ask jokingly whether she had enough to share with everyone.  There was no need.  She held out the package, smiling, and offered it to all the strangers sitting around and across from her.  Only a few took her up on her spontaneous generosity, laughingly and gingerly removing one of the luscious fruits, then eating it with child-like enjoyment.

 

Ping Pong in the Park

I walked by a small street-corner park on my block today that I have passed numerous times and just noticed two outdoor concrete ping pong tables with metal screen nets.  I assume the paddles and ball with which a bunch of older teenagers played they had to bring themselves.  Still, a pretty cool municipally-provided appurtenance for a warm summer day like today.

Also in the neighborhood, today I stumbled across some Stolpersteine I have not seen before.  One, from a family group of three, commemorated a girl who died in a Nazi camp at the age of 22.  Standing there in front of a building’s arched entryway reading these horizontal sidewalk tombs I cannot prevent myself from imagining the unspeakable tragedy of such an end to such a young life, incomprehensible no doubt to her in its unfolding, as it remains to one like me, reading only its skeletal dates.  I can only think of my children about that age.  Another plaque belonged to one Julia Hahn.  Who knows?  Perhaps a cousin from my aunt’s husband’s Hahn family.