William Cook: City of ghosts ... Is Berlin finally a fitting place for Jews to visit?
[William Cook is a British journalist.]
From a distance, we must have looked like just another bus load of British tourists, trudging from site to site on a guided tour of Berlin. But if you'd come a little closer you would have realised we weren't ordinary sightseers, because this particular coach trip was made up entirely of British Jews. Most of our party were Orthodox, many of them were wearing skull caps, and nothing stands out from the crowd quite like a yarmulke in Berlin.
Germany is one of our most important allies, one of our biggest trading partners, but for an awful lot of British Jews, it remains the last taboo. For Gentiles, Berlin has become the capital of cool, but for British Jews it's still the historical headquarters of the Holocaust. And that's why these British visitors were making a little history of their own. This was the first time the German National Tourist Office had ever taken a Jewish group to Berlin, on a tour tailor-made for Jews.
This pioneering party was drawn from a wide range of Anglo-Jewish institutions: charities, research centres, schools. There were a couple of Rabbis too. Some were simply coming to see the city, but others had come to try to answer a uniquely tricky question. A lifetime after the genocide that was initiated here, which led to the murder of six million Jews, is Berlin finally a fitting place for Jews to visit?
Nitza Spiro, a 70-year-old Israeli, is here with Spiro Ark, the education institution her British husband founded to teach Jewish history to Jews and Gentiles. "My family were all wiped out during the Holocaust, apart from my parents," she says. "For me it was a very difficult thing to come to Germany." Growing up in Israel, her family never bought anything made in Germany, yet her mother could still recite Goethe and Schiller. "The culture seeps into you," she says.
"I realise there is a new generation," Nitza says of modern-day Germans. "To be a child of victims, like my family, is much easier than to be a descendent of perpetrators." Yet for her, this is no holiday. "There's no tourism for Jews here," she says.
I was the only Gentile on this trip. Although I've lived my whole life in Britain, I'm actually half-German, and I've spent quite a lot of time trying to trace my German family, who were scattered all around the globe after the Second World War. In the course of researching my ancestry, the biggest surprise was that my German grandfather, a feckless toff who'd been disowned by his relatives after being sent to jail for insurance fraud, turned out to have sheltered a Jewish fugitive from a concentration camp in Berlin during the war, and helped him flee to Switzerland, a feat for which he was awarded the same medal as Oskar Schindler by the state of Israel. I never met my grandfather, but I managed to track down the Jew whose life he saved, and we became good friends. Like many people with German blood, my roots were intertwined with Jewish history. This journey felt important for me too.
Talking to the other people on this trip, I learnt there were no concentration camp survivors in our party, but plenty of them had lost relatives in the Holocaust, and when we arrived in Berlin the mood was amiable but subdued. People didn't pile into the shops and cafés, like Britons on a normal foreign holiday. They waited dutifully for their luggage, and filed on to the bus like anxious students, about to sit an important exam. As we drove into the city, the atmosphere seemed tense. You could tell people had no idea what to expect. Would this trip turn out to be a big mistake?
I can understand why lots of Jews will never come here. You can see why, for many, it would be too painful to spend time or money in a place that hatched the crime of the century, an attempt to wipe out an entire race, and that has now become Europe's top party town. But for all the attractions of the contemporary city – the bars, the clubs, the galleries – Berlin is a city full of ghosts.
Jews have lived here since the city was founded in the 13th century. During the Middle Ages they were driven out four times – and four times, they returned. The community finally found a secure foothold in 1671, when the Prussian Emperor invited rich Viennese Jews to settle here, to help restore the city after the Thirty Years War. During the next 250 years, Jews played a leading role in Berlin's cultural and economic transformation, from provincial capital to metropolis. Jews founded the Berliner Tageblatt, Berlin's leading newspaper, and KaDeWe, Berlin's top department store. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin was a hotbed of Jewish commerce and creativity, the New York of its day, and then ... Well, we know what happened then.
During the 1930s, as the Nazis enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, 80,000 Jews fled Berlin. Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Max Reinhardt and Billy Wilder were among their number. During the war, 55,000 were sent to the death camps. By 1945, only 6,000 remained. During the Cold War that figure remained fairly stable, but after the Berlin Wall came down it doubled, as thousands of Russian Jews flooded in. Today, Berlin has one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world, yet it'll never be a substitute for the community that vanished 70 years ago...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
From a distance, we must have looked like just another bus load of British tourists, trudging from site to site on a guided tour of Berlin. But if you'd come a little closer you would have realised we weren't ordinary sightseers, because this particular coach trip was made up entirely of British Jews. Most of our party were Orthodox, many of them were wearing skull caps, and nothing stands out from the crowd quite like a yarmulke in Berlin.
Germany is one of our most important allies, one of our biggest trading partners, but for an awful lot of British Jews, it remains the last taboo. For Gentiles, Berlin has become the capital of cool, but for British Jews it's still the historical headquarters of the Holocaust. And that's why these British visitors were making a little history of their own. This was the first time the German National Tourist Office had ever taken a Jewish group to Berlin, on a tour tailor-made for Jews.
This pioneering party was drawn from a wide range of Anglo-Jewish institutions: charities, research centres, schools. There were a couple of Rabbis too. Some were simply coming to see the city, but others had come to try to answer a uniquely tricky question. A lifetime after the genocide that was initiated here, which led to the murder of six million Jews, is Berlin finally a fitting place for Jews to visit?
Nitza Spiro, a 70-year-old Israeli, is here with Spiro Ark, the education institution her British husband founded to teach Jewish history to Jews and Gentiles. "My family were all wiped out during the Holocaust, apart from my parents," she says. "For me it was a very difficult thing to come to Germany." Growing up in Israel, her family never bought anything made in Germany, yet her mother could still recite Goethe and Schiller. "The culture seeps into you," she says.
"I realise there is a new generation," Nitza says of modern-day Germans. "To be a child of victims, like my family, is much easier than to be a descendent of perpetrators." Yet for her, this is no holiday. "There's no tourism for Jews here," she says.
I was the only Gentile on this trip. Although I've lived my whole life in Britain, I'm actually half-German, and I've spent quite a lot of time trying to trace my German family, who were scattered all around the globe after the Second World War. In the course of researching my ancestry, the biggest surprise was that my German grandfather, a feckless toff who'd been disowned by his relatives after being sent to jail for insurance fraud, turned out to have sheltered a Jewish fugitive from a concentration camp in Berlin during the war, and helped him flee to Switzerland, a feat for which he was awarded the same medal as Oskar Schindler by the state of Israel. I never met my grandfather, but I managed to track down the Jew whose life he saved, and we became good friends. Like many people with German blood, my roots were intertwined with Jewish history. This journey felt important for me too.
Talking to the other people on this trip, I learnt there were no concentration camp survivors in our party, but plenty of them had lost relatives in the Holocaust, and when we arrived in Berlin the mood was amiable but subdued. People didn't pile into the shops and cafés, like Britons on a normal foreign holiday. They waited dutifully for their luggage, and filed on to the bus like anxious students, about to sit an important exam. As we drove into the city, the atmosphere seemed tense. You could tell people had no idea what to expect. Would this trip turn out to be a big mistake?
I can understand why lots of Jews will never come here. You can see why, for many, it would be too painful to spend time or money in a place that hatched the crime of the century, an attempt to wipe out an entire race, and that has now become Europe's top party town. But for all the attractions of the contemporary city – the bars, the clubs, the galleries – Berlin is a city full of ghosts.
Jews have lived here since the city was founded in the 13th century. During the Middle Ages they were driven out four times – and four times, they returned. The community finally found a secure foothold in 1671, when the Prussian Emperor invited rich Viennese Jews to settle here, to help restore the city after the Thirty Years War. During the next 250 years, Jews played a leading role in Berlin's cultural and economic transformation, from provincial capital to metropolis. Jews founded the Berliner Tageblatt, Berlin's leading newspaper, and KaDeWe, Berlin's top department store. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin was a hotbed of Jewish commerce and creativity, the New York of its day, and then ... Well, we know what happened then.
During the 1930s, as the Nazis enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, 80,000 Jews fled Berlin. Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Max Reinhardt and Billy Wilder were among their number. During the war, 55,000 were sent to the death camps. By 1945, only 6,000 remained. During the Cold War that figure remained fairly stable, but after the Berlin Wall came down it doubled, as thousands of Russian Jews flooded in. Today, Berlin has one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world, yet it'll never be a substitute for the community that vanished 70 years ago...