June 19, 2010
This morning I was taking photographs of the small tributary of the Danube that runs behind my studio, and when I turned around to adjust my films, I saw this smokestack and the symbols. So much for this morning’s idea of a nice Shabbat stroll through the pastoral meadows of Bavaria. It’s difficult to go a few hundred meters beyond my studio without seeing swastikas and SS runes marked on buildings and public pathways.
runes outside my studio in Bavaria
A few hundred meters in the other direction is the monument to the local German soldiers killed during the war. It has everyone’s names in cast bronze, and iron crosses on large granite spheres. It’s located between the main road and a small local bike path that runs alongside the river. There are huts and shacks huddled in the brushes, with swastikas painted deep into the wooden slats of their fences.
Wild roses spring up alongside, and great sprays of cat tail and Queen Anne’s lace. A woman cycles past with a small dog in her basket. An old man pulls the weeds from his row of onions.
On Thursday night, a local woman told me she had a funny story about the Jews in this town. She said that during the war, a little boy from Hamburg had been sent down to this small village to avoid the bombings. He was taken in by a local family, who cared for him throughout the war. In the final weeks, this town was bombed, and many hid in the beer caves underground.
“When the Americans came, they held us all captive in the caves for ten days, including this boy.” She looked at me. “They thought that we were all Nazis, so they put us in this prison.” A few hundred meters behind us was a series of small painted swastikas that had been halfheartedly scraped off the city walls.
“This boy came back to visit us as an old man. He told us about what happened after the war, when his foster family was forced to take in a family of Jewish refugees from the camps. Even though he hated the Jews, even though they were his enemies, he ate at the same table with them. He agreed to eat in their presence.”
I wasn’t sure about this anecdote.
She continued, explaining further: “You see, during the war, the Jews were our enemies. But then afterwards, we had to share things with them. Isn’t that funny?” She looked at me, smiling, expectant.
I failed to respond – the muscles in my face stunned into immobility.
We stood there for quite some time, each looking at the other in total disorientation. A few years ago, a group of twenty local Nazis set fire to the house of a Turkish family, burning them all to death. One of them served a short sentence, and has been free ever since. The rest remain in this cluster of villages – my neighbors.
She broke the silence, “you see, it’s very funny. The Jews were our enemies. But he eats with them.”
I think it’s the possessive pronoun that really snarls. Our.
It’s such an empowered, active stance: enemies. I would say massive genocidal slaughter of defenseless civilians conducted by a state military and police force. I’d say I don’t feel like an enemy, I feel like it was an error that any of us are even alive.
At nearly every bus stop in this town is painted the acronym for the active far-right neo-Nazi political party, whose regional chairman lives nearby. It’s a very small village. Recently, say the local papers, the neo-Nazis held a rally on the anniversary of the murder of the Turkish family. They marched through the central street.
I still am not sure about this neighbor’s anecdote, or about what she wants from me. About who she thought I was, and what I could possibly say. I know she is waiting for me to laugh.
She’s standing there, waiting, a little defiant, a little wilted, slightly impatient, trying to help me see the humor in it. “It’s funny,” she finally pronounces, “because he was was forced to share a house with the enemy Jews from Flossenburg camp but he agreed to eat at the same table. He decided to eat anyway, even though he hates the Jews he needed to eat.” She climbs past me up the stairs.
The boy had been five.
Last night, there was not an option of sharing a Shabbat table with a local Jewish family, because they’re all murdered.
Apparently, life in Bavaria goes on. The little boy didn’t have to grow up to do much more tolerating, because there’s nobody here to tolerate. Instead, there are other things to occupy the time: there are cans of spray paint to buy. There are walls to be written on. There are funny stories to tell about the Jews.
As I drank my Shabbat wine in the Kunstlerhaus, darkness covered the walls of this town. But it didn’t obscure the runes and symbols that still warn and boast of murder and power and genocide.
Recently, a Canadian woman on a bus in Munich told me to get my head out of the past and do an art project that is more relevant to the world, and let everyone move on past the Holocaust. “The Germans have suffered enough,” she said, precisely.
Is this really about suffering? I’m not sure. I think it’s about when you try to kill something, and it doesn’t die. It almost dies, but not quite. Not really.
In this town, there is occasional counter-graffiti: anarchy circles with the words “Nazis get out.” It hardly comforts. It’s impossible to know who is writing what, and to whom. The faces are all indistinguishable. With the quantity of graffiti and its apparent age, there is no great hurry to wash it away or cover it up, and no great attempt.
When I try to walk through this countryside, I feel a sense of pain that has no parallel. I feel the shadow of death, and I want to think it’s in the past, it’s long ago, that the space it takes up inside me now is a personal hang-up, some self-limiting neurosis that I just can’t quite release. The other day, I had a stressful email exchange with a colleague far away, and an involved third party suggested I go for a long walk through the countryside and clear my head. Without thinking, I snapped back, “I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a relaxing country walk for a Jew in Bavaria.”
When I try it, I feel a persistent sharp pressure at my back, as though I’m being watched: by those who killed, by those who were murdered, and I wonder if there’s something deeply wrong with me.
And then I turn around, and men are laughing, walking back towards town, carrying plastic bags filled with empty cans of spray paint, and they turn and catch my eye, and stop walking.