Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  [illegible signature] by [illegible]

  Reichsbahnoberamtmann u. Major d.R.a.D

  In the early twenties, the notes in his file, typed in by various officials, had still been somewhat neutral: “No detriment is apparent in the character of the applicant.” “There are no indications that he is of anti-German sentiment.”

  But a few years later, the situation looked very different. His case had made the rounds three times by now, and in each round Gustav had striven to meet the ever-increasing requirements and standards, adding additional references and proofs, filling in small résumé gaps, giving new testimonies. But in the last round I read new language typed in the space designated for the argument’s conclusion:

  Any liabilities are unknown at this time. Apart from the question of race, there are no indications that speak for or against. Anti-German sentiments are not presumed.

  And later, in the final document, titled “Beschluß des Hauptausschusses als Senat,” issued in 1929:

  The applicant is of Galician origin and a Polish national. The Munich City Council General Assembly has decided to refuse naturalization applications from Polish citizens until further notice, considering that cultural interests call for restraint towards naturalization applications from states whose citizens may be said to originate from cultures which are of lesser value. Furthermore, a gradual penetration of German culture with elements alien to its nature and harmful to the maintenance of its individuality should continue to be prevented.

  In economic terms, too, naturalization is quite undesirable; The applicant is currently studying economics and has no income of his own; In addition to his mother’s aid, he lives on grants from the city youth welfare office, in whose files he is now described as a “benefitsswindler,” as a result of the support granted by the University of Munich and the “Studentenhaus” association while posing as an out-of-work traveler to the welfare office and receiving the unemployment benefit. The District Welfare Office does not grant the citizenship request.

  With this spew of vitriol, the file comes to an end. There are some private comments scribbled by relevant officials, but the case is officially closed in April 1929.

  * * *

  • • •

  Reading this was physically painful for me, perhaps because I imagined how it would feel to get an answer like this right now, in relation to my own case, and how it would speak to something in me that I already believed, namely, that there was something in me that was poisonous, that was inferior, that deserved to be marginalized. And I wondered how he must have felt then, he who had grown up with one acceptable parent and one alienated one, with a foot in each world but no real standing in either one, with a yearning to be part of something, before the ultimate rejection had crushed those dreams. Ultimately he must have struggled with shame, grief, and unworthiness many times greater than my own.

  I thought of how I had struggled as a child to prove worthy of acceptance in our community, and while it wasn’t an equal comparison, I still felt lucky to have escaped that framework. I had essentially freed myself from the affliction of having to perceive myself through the alienating lens of others. He had not been able to do the same. In his NS-victim file it said he had been arrested on October 28, 1938, imprisoned in Stadelheim Jail, and then deported via Sonderzug, “special train,” to the Polish border. He had made his way back to his family on foot and immediately left for England. Yes, he had escaped successfully, at the age of forty-two, with his wife and two children, and had started a new life there, completely reinventing his past in order to be accepted by the Jewish community. He had even expanded his family, but I had heard enough stories about him from my mother to know that he had never fully recovered from this blow. His decade-long struggle to assimilate himself and see this effort legitimized by the state in which he had been born, raised, and educated had failed. This was a shot of pure poison, designed to debilitate and degrade. Just reading the words, I could feel them degrade me. They were printed on an official-looking piece of paper, issued by an office of a state, and this gave them a kind of weight that seemed to hold even now, even though the paper was yellowed with age and more than eighty-five years had passed.

  But Moris comforted me and said that all this information was very useful; in fact, he had changed his mind about how to file the case. Before, we would have simply gone the routine route by requesting the return of ostensibly confiscated citizenship. Now he was going to move for an Ermessenseinbürgerung, a discretionary naturalization, for which he explained to me there were many different preconditions. One of them was a Verfolgungsbedingtefamilienschicksal, an inexplicably long German word denoting a “familial fate marked by persecution.” He could present it as a Wiedergutmachung case with unique conditions, by which he meant we would present reasoning for the acquisition of the citizenship that had been withheld from my great-grandfather for reasons that were now seen as unconstitutional. And these letters were all the proof we needed for that, clear as day.

  “In the end, Deborah,” he said to me, “it will be a great triumph, to gain from the state something your grandfather was unable to do. It will close the chapter for him. Der kreis wird sich schliessen, the circle will close.”

  Would it bring peace to his soul, I wondered, to see this great injustice rectified almost a century later? Would it bring peace to mine?

  * * *

  —

  When I made the decision to abandon the community that Holocaust survivors had founded in order to separate themselves from the rest of the world and the evil in it, I unconsciously took with me the teachings I had been raised with, and I began to practice hiding my Jewishness until it felt safe to reveal it. I learned a very American thing: how to pass.

  In the dreams I had then, I often found myself attempting to convince the faceless man to let me out of the line completely. I tried to explain to him that it was a mistake that I was there at all. I desired nothing more than for him to acknowledge that I was not like the others standing with me. I no longer yearned to be selected to accompany my grandmother; I now yearned to be pulled out of the ranks completely, to be told I was exempt.

  My first visit to Germany when I was twenty-five was in many ways a confirmation of all the fears I had nursed as a child. I returned to America convinced it was the scorched earth my elders had always warned me about. Only something else had happened too: I had met a real person. And this person was German, and through this man I met other Germans, and while not all of my encounters were pleasant, there were many individuals with whom I came to form friendships and who impressed me deeply with their political convictions and ideals. And since I had always felt that my Jewishness was an accident of birth, I began to ask myself why Germanness was not the same. And thus I formed the question that had never occurred to me before, namely, what if I had been German during that time?

  Recently I began to have a new version of that old Auschwitz dream. Now I am not in line at all anymore. Now I am sometimes in uniform myself. Each time I slip into that familiar scene, I inhabit a different role. I am no longer able to identify with that singular position I inhabited as a child. My brain seems to keep insisting on that question: What if?

  I understand now that while being in the victim position is painful and frightening, it is also relatively easier to process emotionally. But when I try to imagine myself as a German in that scenario, I immediately lose the comfort of having the moral high ground. There is no clarity in the answer to that question. It does not compute, to picture myself going through the motions that would have been assigned to me. After all, I had doubted my ability to survive as a child, so how could I not doubt that I would have had the moral courage to risk my life if the situation were reversed? Was it really a matter of certainty that I would have had the mettle to disobey orders as an oppressor? I want to believe it, of course. I want to be able to categorically claim that I know myself well enough to be sure that becomi
ng a perpetrator was not a possibility, but in that tiny one percent sliver of uncertainty lies enough doubt to dismantle my entire thesis about good and evil.

  As I watch myself switch roles in my dream, I finally learn to understand the world in new terms, not as bad and good, but as constantly in flux. The world could change at any moment, and the only heroism lies in understanding this as it is happening, instead of looking back in hindsight with regrets.

  EPILOGUE

  In regard to my application for discretionary naturalization, the Ministry of the Interior sent notice of their decision in the affirmative on April 18, 2017. It can be deduced that a case like this reaches a positive conclusion most probably as a result of what is euphemistically termed “cultural interest.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I have lived in Germany now for six years, and in that time, even as I have borne personal witness to hate, I have beheld the courage of individuals in the face of it, individuals who have utilized their knowledge of history to react sensitively and bravely in situations where it is far easier to simply sit back. It is the sum total of these individual actions that served to reassure me.

  I feel that the memory of Auschwitz is neither solely a Jewish nor solely a German responsibility. For me, the act of remembering the Holocaust is a therapeutic opportunity to meditate on a shared vulnerability and to reinforce our common bond in the battle to protect it. Hate will never disappear, not here, not anywhere else, but the citizens of this country will not remain passive in the face of it. I am surrounded by those who have shown themselves willing to take a stand against the momentum of hatred building in our society, and should they need me to do the same, I can truly say that I have learned to find that courage within myself. Because it is here, where ordinary citizens have learned the act of moral fortitude in the most painful way, that I finally was able to go back to that child within myself, the one who doubted that she had the strength to withstand the tests that life threw at her, and teach her that to prevail is a decision, one that we make as individuals, but also one we make together.

  My instinctual and primal rejection of the country I would also one day designate as my home was and remains an integral and indistinguishable part of the process of reclaiming it. As my grandmother had once told me, the world was created in opposites; without darkness there could be no light, without the force of my own repulsion there would be no propulsion.

  I have always sensed a struggle in me similar to that of an automatic lens seeking focus, torn between a wide-angle, faraway setting, which reduces everything to a “big picture” with few details, a setting that was programmed into me from a young age, and the desire to “zoom in” and examine the details, to see the trees instead of the forest, which somehow managed to flourish within me despite the attempts to repress it. During my first trips to Germany as well as the first few years spent living here, I often felt as if the lens in my mind was stuck on the setting programmed into me, and no matter how much I wanted to “zoom,” all that happened when I attempted to do so was that strange choking and stuttering that anyone familiar with an automatic camera incapable of focusing will understand.

  Later, as I managed to free myself from this stuttering panic, I fell into a state that I already thought of then in German as Schwanken (the state of a pendulum that has already seen its most extreme swing and is now swaying back and forth as the reverberating force of that climax ripples onward). And while the Schwanken may be a phenomenon that will last a long time, maybe even a lifetime, I believe that it will steadily diminish, that these plunges will become less frequent and, when they do occur, less extreme. The pendulum may never come to perfect stillness, but it is questionable whether I would still be the same person if it could.

  * * *

  • • •

  There are still moments right now when I fail to see what is in front of me and instead project onto it the past that once haunted my childhood dreams: I see something threatening in an angular, pale face; I interpret someone’s rudeness as reflective of a greater evil, for example. But I have learned to focus on the individual instead of the whole, to think in new terms instead of the ones drilled into me, and in that process I have been freed from many fears and limitations. I believe I was enabled in this process largely by literature. There are various authors who not only inspired me but guided me through specific phases in my life, who first taught me to ask the right questions and then pushed me to learn their answers. And even after I left my community and for a brief moment pushed away the books because it was painful to realize that I was still stuck in their pages instead of living my own story, it was from them that I eventually learned to mold my new narrative. From Jean Améry I learned intellectual courage; from Salomon Maimon I learned to trust in myself; from Primo Levi I learned compassion and forgiveness, not only for humanity in general but also for myself, in all our flaws; from Czesław Miłosz I learned that identity is where we come from, but that it must not dictate where we are going; from Adrienne Rich I learned that even two halves that have been “split” can still come together as a whole; from Baudrillard I learned the importance of a relationship with one’s surroundings and how to develop that; and yes, from Gregor von Rezzori I learned that racism is a part of human nature, that it is a parasite waiting to pounce in all of us, even myself.

  Rezzori artfully not only describes the prejudices against Jews and the inescapability of their social rank, but also quite cleverly illustrates the deep and age-old desire of a people who yearn to supersede their imposed limitations, who wish to be free of the identity they were born with, who, like their enemies, have no special desire to sacrifice their humanity for the reward of being counted among an ethnic minority. When one changes one’s name, one wants to be counted among those for whom the name is recognizable. I abandoned both my Hebrew first name and my conspicuous maiden surname to blend in more easily; I wanted not just to be back in Europe—no, I also wanted to be a European, and I would discover, like many have before me, that only the first is a simple and practical matter. The second goal requires more of a struggle. But if it’s so difficult, if all I can do is complain, then why am I here? Why have I accepted German citizenship and dedicated my life to this new language, to this culture, to these people? Even for native Germans, Germanness is something they view with ambivalence at best and Ressentiments at worst, and yet here I am, product of a society for whom Deutsch-sein, being German, was the ultimate evil, embracing that dreaded state.

  Primo Levi recalls in his last work, The Drowned and the Saved, being often asked if Auschwitz will return. He points to a “concurrence of a number of factors” that would be a prerequisite for a repeat performance. He says, “These factors can occur again and are already recurring in various parts of the world.” And yet he states, where the “Lagers of World War II are still part of the memory of many, on both the popular and governmental levels, and a sort of immunizational defense is at work which amply coincides with the shame of which I have spoken,” such a recurrence is more unlikely than anywhere else. This is a theory that coincides with one I developed prior to reading this work. I surmised that if Rezzori was right, and racism was a disease infecting us all, the only hope was a strong immune defense to keep it in check. And if there is anything I’ve learned in my time here, it’s that the immune system is stronger where there is memory, where it is kept alive through careful, painstaking care, and that perhaps by becoming a part of this collective act of remembering, I could contribute to its continued strength.

  * * *

  • • •

  I did not come to Germany because I was running away from my past, although it is true that the physical distance has had an enormous impact on my feeling of safety and peace. I did not come here seeking some utopia either. I do not want or need to hide from evil, or rather, the tragedy of mortal fallibility, the way that my community would like to do. If the combination of social action, pol
itical constructs, and a system of law acts like a network of muscles in the body of the state, then I came to a place where I could see that muscle tested enough to build its strength, to witness it flexing in response to stress, to support it so that it can withstand exertion without tearing. I came to be a small fiber in that muscle.

  I am not yet this. Even though I am in possession of the passport, I suspect it will take some time before I “become” German. But it is the beginning of my new story, the story I finally discovered within myself, one of various disparate threads woven together to create a new cloth, and like the stories that came before, it is becoming one I may well tell you someday.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Penguin Random House for giving me another chance at this endeavor! It just goes to show that it’s never too late to find a kindred spirit in publishing, by which I mean my editor, Maya Ziv, at Dutton and Plume. Thank you so much for your open mind, contagious enthusiasm, and unflagging willingness to slog through all the hard work. I’m also grateful to my German agent, Matthias Landwehr, and his American partner, Markus Hoffmann, for assisting me with this transition. It is such a tremendous relief to be able to reconnect with my English-language readers; they were my first audience, after all, and it is because of their warm engagement that all this began, and their continued interest and support is a big part of what sustains me.

  I feel so lucky to have fellow travelers in my wanderings and am especially thankful to Richard T. Scott, Milena Kartowski-Aiach, and Esther Munkacsi for the guidance they shared along the way. Zoltán Janosi, Gabi Losonczi, and Farkas Bacsi—those few days I spent with you all in Nyíregyháza were some of the most poignant and transformative of my life. I will never be able to repay your immense generosity and kindness. Per, thank you for helping me translate that file, even though it was written in old Swedish. Gina, those few days that you hosted us in Murnau were transcendent. Thank you for opening up your home and your heart to total strangers. I have been so fortunate to find anonymous yet heartfelt kindness in unexpected corners and will try to pay that kindness forward to the next traveler I meet.