I Sleep in Hitler's Room (23 page)

“To beat JPMorgan.”

What??

“They are the best, and we want to beat them. Be number one.”

That’s it?

“Till we beat them. Then we’ll see.”

OK. Let’s leave the companies aside for the moment. Let’s talk about you. You’ve made a lot of money, have you not?

“Yes.”

And you want more?

“Yes.”

How much money is enough? When will you call it quits? When will you say, I have enough?

“You are asking me a tough question.”

When is “George” going to say, Enough!?

“I am not going to tell you that.”

Aren’t you a millionaire?

“Yes. I am a millionaire, but there are millions of millionaires. I need money for things. For my family. For relatives whom I want to help.”

I’m sure you’ve already set aside enough money for these purposes. Haven’t you?

“Yes.”

So, what’s the goal? Why keep on working?

“I would also like to study a new language. And I would like to go to university and take a course in music.”

Hard to believe what the man is saying. Can you believe it? That’s why I’m not a millionaire; I can’t answer questions like George. A whole semester costs 500 euros, and this millionaire tells me he must keep on working so he can afford the tuition. I love it!

How many people work under you?

“None.”

Don’t fool yourself. George is not a janitor at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. No, not really.

“In my position you don’t have employees under you. Your employees are virtual.”

Is he the iPad director? Nope.

“In my position, you have clients. You meet the clients and then you create teams.”

Who are your clients?

“Siemens. Lufthansa.”

You’re a big shot. You make tons of money.

“I do.”

And you won’t tell me how much is enough?

“No.”

Not enough yet?

“Not yet.”

The emir of Qatar is still at it. Not enough for him. Not yet. Not for him and not for you.

George laughs, like a child caught eating a forbidden fruit. He points to a bicycle on the street opposite us. “You see that? That’s my Porsche.”

I feel bad for you, my poor man. You don’t have a car?

“No.”

Really?

“Really.”

And your wife?

George laughs. “She has a small Mercedes,” he says.

The man tried. What has he got to lose? It’s part of the spiel.

George has to leave now. It’s Sunday afternoon, and there’s a corporate meeting he must attend.

“So, you saw
Daphne
last night,” says George before leaving. “He had a questionable past,” George comments, referring to Strauss, the man who once dedicated a song to Josef Goebbels while at the same time he did his utmost to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law.

And I thought that today I would get a rest from the Jews and the Nazis.

But George had to kill those two birds for me with one shot.

That’s what happens when you meet a financier in Frankfurt am Main on a Sunday.

He leaves and so do I. He goes to his corporate meeting. I go to Rossmarkt.

Italy against New Zealand. No German flags today, sorry. The game ends 1–1 and I go to the local McDonald’s. I order a meal and a latte and sit outside to consume my four-euro expenditure.

A man sitting next to me, obviously in thirst for a couple of ears, starts talking to me. His name is Herr Kraus and he loves traveling. That’s his hobby. He was born in 1936 in Berlin and he cannot recall ever seeing an SS man or a Gestapo member. “I grew up in war,” he says to me, “I didn’t know any other reality and for me it was normal.” What he does remember, however, is the air bombardment by the Allied forces. “My father told me that Rome will pray for us. That was my religious education.”

It would be interesting to see what kind of education the young of Germany are getting these days. To find out, the next day I head out for two schools in Frankfurt.

The first is Freie Schule für Erwachsene (Free school for adults). This is the place of the unlucky guys and girls, the ones who were doomed into different kinds of schools, those that guarantee a future in low-paying jobs. There’s a very complicated formula in this wide land, one that my little head does not fully comprehend but that determines which school you’ll get into. One kind of school trains you to become a doctor, one trains you to become a technician, and the third one will teach you how to bake a pita and clean the toilet. Not exactly, but more or less that’s the system.

The students here are doubly unlucky. Not only are they from the Toilet Department of Education, but they also happen to be dropouts, meaning that at some point in life they quit Toilet Cleaning 101. The good thing is, these boys and girls have decided to go back to school, and that’s why they are here. No, they will not get what is called here Abitur, which is reserved for the Lucky Boys and Girls
Verein
, but they will get Second Best and a chance to study more and maybe at some point get an Abitur.

Most likely no “George” will come out of them, no Volker, no Otto, and of course no Half and Half and no Rabbi Schmidt. But these people want better than what they have now, they wish for more, and they try to fight the system.

Today is test day. Oral exam. If they pass they can move on, if they fail they’re out.

In a few minutes these students will present what they know, or don’t know, to a committee of teachers: the Judges.

The judges are all white. The examined are a “mosaic” of people: blacks, whites, and whatever in between.

If they get a score of 6 or higher, they fail. The best is 1.

Objective: Get as close to 1 as you can.

The subject is history. The details are up to them.

First student chooses to give a presentation on the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Is he Jewish? I ask.

“No,” he says. “But this story means a lot to me.”

OK. It’s a free country, as Alvaro the Italian taught me.

Facing his judges, this teenager talks about the Jews and about what the “Germans did to the Jews.”

The white Germans listen as this foreigner speaks about the “Germans,” which is them. This is so theatrical! Better than any German theater I’ve ever seen.

It’s Absurd theater, to an extent. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry when I realize what this student is doing. He turns the tables; he turns his judges into the accused.

The Warsaw-ghetto admirer gets 2 minus.

Next student, please!

His topic: World War II.

What’s gotten into his head? World War II? Couldn’t he find something easier?

Well, it was his choice.

He gets some facts right. Like the extermination of Jews. (I can’t believe we get to this topic again!) Then he quickly moves on to the end of the war. Russia, he says, ended it.

Only Russia, asks one of the judges?

“America, too, I think,” says the student.

And that’s it? asks the judge.

“China, also.”

This guy should get a 9, at least.

But one of the judges, who is the Last of the Mohicans, won’t allow him to fail. Her name is Ines, and she’s a liberal woman of the kind you rarely see. She’s the real McCoy. She’s not a liberal like your average liberal politician, the kind who abuses the term
liberal
. She’s a Liberal in the real sense of the word. She believes that everybody deserves a chance in life, even our discoverer of China.

The discoverer of China deserves a great mark because he “delivered his presentation with full confidence.” She must be kidding. But, no, she’s real. She’s a rare bird of a human indeed. She fights now for every “less point.” And while you can’t really agree with her arguments, you know that the Fatherland is lucky to have Innes as a Daughter.

She wins. This China discoverer gets 4 minus.

Full stop, as Roman of Claims Conference says.

The second school I go to is Wöhlerschule. The students here are the best of the best, and they look it. Well groomed, well mannered, well dressed, and well poised for the future.

I sit in a classroom, and the students present are in
Mathematik Leistungskurs
. Make no mistake: These are the smartest of the smart. Advanced math. The next Rabbi Schmidt is coming from here; the next Sheikh Jens. But not Half and Half. All of these pupils, lo and behold, are German German. “It just happened,” the teacher tells me. “Usually our classes are much more mixed.”

How come this one is not?

“It’s because this is the math group.”

Yeah, of course. How could I miss it! To be really smart, you gotta be white. I look at these extra-fortunate youngsters and I ask them:

What would you like to be when you grow up?

After two minutes of silence—they are totally unprepared for this kind of questioning, as soon becomes evident—I detect a sound:

Student 1: “I want to be free.”

Be what?

“Free.”

Free to do what?

“Whatever I want.”

Good. What is it you want?

“To be free!”

That’s it?

“Yes.”

I think he should get his Abitur on the spot. Today. This hour. This very minute.

There’s a mathematical reasoning to what he says, an exponential derivative, and his brilliance must be recognized. This boy is pure genius. Not that I get him, but how many people understand geniuses? That’s the whole idea of being genius, isn’t it?

Student 2: A pained expression and half a laugh.

Student 3: “I don’t know.”

Student 4: “I want to be a doctor.”

Praised be Goethe! We have a winner! Doctor of what? I ask.

“Doctor.”

Yeah. Got that. In what?

“Doctor in, in, eh. Doctor!”

Dentist?

“No, no dentist!”

Psychiatrist?

“Maybe.”

Gynecologist?

“Maybe.”

I get nowhere. So I ask another question:

Are you happy to live in this country?

“It’s OK,” one of them says.

If there’s a war between Germany and France, how many of you will join the fight to protect Germany?

Not a single one of them. Now, this is surprising.

But I shouldn’t be surprised. “This is not America,” one of the boys explains to me. “We’re not like the American students. We don’t recite the pledge of allegiance every morning.”

It’s good that I came to Germany to find out what I had been doing in New York every morning. Somehow I never knew.

“My great grandfather,” one of the students suddenly speaks out, “was a train driver during the war. In the service of the Nazis. I don’t know if he drove people to their deaths.”

“My grandfather,” says another, “was in the SS.”

Is that why you are not going to protect your country? I stop this sudden group psych-revelation.

“Yes. This is our history.”

Do you think about that history much?

“Yes.”

Why are young people like you thinking of a war that ended so long ago? Is it because your teachers shove too much Holocaust studies in your faces?

No. Not at all. On the contrary. Speaking with much passion, one student almost pleads with me, in the presence of his teacher: “Our teachers don’t teach us enough. Just numbers and dates. They don’t go in depth. They don’t tell us what really happened. We want to know more.”

This is not what I knew or read about young German students. But reading the papers is one thing, reality is another. Other students nod in agreement while he speaks. And yet another adds: “They don’t tell us how it happened, why it happened.”

Are they just shoving numbers and stats at you without bothering to teach you in detail what really happened?

“Yes, that’s what they do.”

I tell them a story about the war, an example of what happened in this country long before they were born.

At the time, young women of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, were taught they shouldn’t use deodorant or lipstick, because these were inventions of the Jews. Why did the Jews invent it? The Jews, Nazi theologians argued, were born deformed and are regularly emitting strange odors. But the German woman, who is beautiful from birth and naturally smells good, doesn’t need artificial ingredients.

The students look at me, transfixed by what I tell them.

Our teachers, they say, should teach us these things!

Their teacher sits next to me. He is shocked and ashamed. He stares at his pupils. “I didn’t know,” he says to me.

Yes, I can’t blame them for having this one dream: Be Free.

As I leave the school, the only thought that crosses my mind is this: I love these kids.

I might be a little psychotic. After I leave the blessed kids I go to see heroin shooters. Don’t ask me to explain this.

The heroin here, where I’ve just arrived, is legal. It’s a government program that allows addicts to inject themselves with heroin, supplied by the government.

As I enter the premises, a man tells me that “one hundred people, plus or minus five, get heroin shots here every day, and a hundred others get methadone treatment.”

The youngest person treated here is twenty-three years old, and the average age is forty. All who come here have tried other treatments and failed. They come up to three times daily, get heroin at a supervised dosage—the max is 900 milligrams daily—and they inject themselves.

Werner Heinz, the person responsible for the psychological social services here, says it’s important that the people feel they are not excluded from society. Many of the patients, as Heinz calls them, started taking drugs at the age of twelve or thirteen, and “they stopped their biography,” as he puts it.

I assume there’s a psychological need in you that makes you work with these people. What is it?

“I feel an intellectual challenge working with them.”

Give me more!

“I come from the left side of society, politically. There is an anger that I carry with me. In 1968, I was sixteen years old, and 1968 influenced me a lot. The early writings of Marx influenced me, and I acquired sympathy for the Third World. The Third World is far away, but a counterpart to that world is here, with the heroin people.”