Building Bridges Between Incompatible Spaces
Gert: January 1, 2010
The magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, my favorite daily newspaper, recently carried a long and fascinating interview with two famous Jewish-German writers: Henryk M. Broder and Maxim Biller. The interview is a kind of intellectual fighting match, full of humour, wit, and irony, focussing on their work, their roles and identities, and their relationship (which hardly seems to exist). I know Broder better than Biller, he regularly comments on politics and culture in Germany, often harshly, yet almost never boring.
In this interview, Broder mentions that he had once been friends with the son of a bad Nazi criminal. The “funny thing” about their relationship, Broder says, was that his non-Jewish German friend had ablutomania (obsessional washing) and he had asthma (Broder’s father had survived Auschwitz.): “There we faced each other. I was gasping for air with my aerosol, and he was constantly on his way to the bathroom to wash his hands. That his father had been a Nazi criminal had not harmed our friendship (SZ Magazin, 50/2009, p. 18).” Biller responds that he could not be friends with such a person, because it was impossible to separate a human being from his history. He would either feel nerved by that person’s urge to compensate, or he would suspect that he secretly harboured thoughts similar to his father’s.
This exchange made me think why you trust me. As I know from Motherland (your book about your first trip to Germany, the original home of your mother), you had been quite sceptical about my country; but you also relate positive experiences. And when you returned to Germany with you mother in 2006 for a lecture tour which my wife and I together with old friends of yours and new friends of ours had arranged for you, you told me that you had found a different Germany, much more open and more willing to face its evil past. Of course, since then the trust has also grown through our correspondence.
Currently, I am reading a new book by Alexandra Senfft: Fremder Feind, so nah: Begegnungen mit Palästinensern und Israelis, Hamburg 2009 (something like: Enemies, Unknown and yet so Close: Exchanges with Israelis and Palestinians). Ms. Senfft is an orientalist and a journalist, who has worked for the German Bundestag and for the UN. She is also a granddaughter of Hanns Ludin, Hitler’s representative in Slovakia, who was responsible for the deportation and annihilation of the Slovak Jews and was hanged in 1947. In her first book, Schweigen tut weh (Silence Hurts), she describes the difficult and torn life of her mother (she finally burnt to death in a steaming-hot bathtub), the eldest daughter of Hanns Ludin, who knew that something had been wrong with her beloved father but did not or could not openly challenge the family secret.
Alexandra Senfft participated in the late Dan Bar-On’s workshops on reconciliation, which were based on the willingness to tell one’s life’s story and to listen to the stories of others: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, and people from other nations. She now uses this method in her own work and in her interviews with Israelis and Palestinians who work for peace in the Middle East, several of them jointly, whatever their own bad experiences either from the Holocaust or the conflict in the region. She is friends with Yizhar Be’er, a former director of B’Tselem, the famous Israeli human rights organization. (Yizhar Be’er’s mother survived Auschwitz.) Of course, their life stories, the stories of their families, were very different indeed, and yet there were some parallels, she says. A lot of things would never be compatible, yet they had built a bridge between them, where they could meet again and again and exchange views and experiences. Then she quotes Yizhar Be’er: “The past is strongly present, even if we don’t think about it or deny it. Instinctively, I have passed on my mother’s experience to my own children. They suffer as third generation, without knowing it, and they will make their imprint on the next generation. Many Israelis still carry the legacy of the Holocaust in them and even today feel like refugees (pp. 182-183).” And she adds that we Germans also have generational transmissions. The experiences of World War II had still not been fully worked through, and many people still denied their relatives’ complicity in the murder of the Jews. Even today, denial, complicity and shame subtly affected our society.
In the course of our dialogue, I will tell you many stories about that.
[Many Germans transferred these unsolved feelings onto the Middle East conflict and overidentified with one or the other side, in order to avoid grappling with their own past.
Well, in my own work on the Middle East, I’m almost desperately trying to be as fair as possible, for professional as well as personal reasons. Alexandra Senfft’s new book is tremendously helpful in this respect.]
