I Sleep in Hitler's Room (31 page)

“You are the Israeli?”

Yes. Convince me to make peace with the Palestinians.

Helge takes his job seriously and starts his imaginary peacemaker role. “Open the borders. I talked to the Palestinians and they are very friendly. All Israelis and Palestinians who want to work can be involved in cleaning up all the mess in the area, and everyone will get twenty dollars an hour. Thirty-five hours a week. This is the beginning.”

Will you offer the same to the Palestinians?

“Yes.”

The manager is not very active here. Let me change hats with him. I am going to be the Palestinian. Any problem with this, Helge?

Helge agrees, and I play the Palestinian.

I don’t want the Jews here. You, Germans, killed them; you take them. I didn’t send them to Auschwitz, you did. I was born here, my papa, my grandpa, back through history. Take your Jews and pay them whatever you want. Take them back to Germany and keep your twenty dollars!

Helge gets scared. This is not what he had imagined in his peacemaking dreams. He says: “I am done. I did my job. End of my peace efforts for now.”

Obviously the Middle East is on his mind. I ask him why.

“You see the news and it’s the Middle East all the time. Also Hitler. Every day you can see Hitler on TV, on one channel or another.”

Speaking of Hitler. Did you ever ask your parents or grandparents about the war years?

“I saw a picture of my uncle in a black uniform, and I think it was the uniform of the SS. I also saw a document, belonging to my aunt, that was stamped by the authorities, certifying that she’s Aryan. But I never asked my parents about the war. My father had a hunchback and was very short, a dwarf, and my mother was also deformed, she had one leg shorter than the other. I don’t think they were involved in the war, and so I never asked. As a kid I was ashamed of my parents, and when we went for a walk together I always walked a hundred meters ahead, so that people wouldn’t see us together. Only after I got older, when I had turned fourteen year, was I proud of them.”

If your parents were not deformed, would you be different?

“Probably. My father was short, and I had red hair and I was skinny. And my classmates used to make fun of me. They called me Egghead.”

Deformed parents, red hair and a skinny body, plus a perfectly kosher Aryan family . . . That’s a lot of baggage to carry, isn’t it?

“Yes. But this is the only life I know, I didn’t have another. For my father, the dwarf, all people were equal, the ones on top and the ones at the bottom. And this I learned from him.”

I try to imagine it: a dwarf who looks around and from his position, unless he tilts his head, sees only legs walking. He can’t tell the difference between this pair of legs and the other pair of legs.

I guess this is what Helge means when he talks about all people being equal.

Helge can’t help it. Again he must show his guest how PC he is. All people are equal. Yes, I agree that, legally speaking, all people are equal. Meaning, every person should have the same chances, opportunities, and rights. But are all of us equal? No. Some of us are dwarfs. Not all of us have the same talents. Not all of us are beautiful. And not all of us are smart.

I look at Helge, a funny man with a very sad beginning. Is this what made him funny, the harsh realities of his life’s beginning? I don’t know. There are similarities between Helge and his country. But Helge is not a country, he’s a man, and a comedian. You can laugh while listening to him, but if you choose to cry instead that would be equally appropriate.

Bavaria voted against smoking in public. This is one of the harshest antismoking laws in Germany. Smoking Prohibited, says the sign in Dachau. History goes in cycles and circles. In “celebrating” this prohibition, Till gives me a nice little gift, a Cuban cigar. I hold it and think of how much absurdity this one little item contains within it. The commodity is a no-go in the United States. Some kind of embargo. The United States against Cuba. Strange little law.

Cigar in my pocket, I move on to Duisburg.

What should I do in Duisburg?

There’s a Tourist Information desk in the shopping area, maybe I should check with them. The girl at the counter welcomes me with a smile. The people of Duisburg are very welcoming people, she tells me. Is she a Duisburg girl? Yes, she is.

What’s interesting in Duisburg?

A boat tour is nice, she informs me, but the last one has already left.

Is there a good place to eat? I ask her. I like Turkish food. Where’s the best Turkish restaurant in town? Anything good in, let’s say, Marxloh?

“Marxloh,” she says, “is in Turkish hands.” There’s nothing to see there unless “you are interested in the mosque.”

Mosques are good. But does Duisburg also have churches, synagogues?

She shows me a picture of the synagogue, very beautiful, it seems. It’s like an open book with different leaves.

Can I attend some services? That would be nice. Would you know when they have services?

“There are services, but for members only.”

What kind of services are they?

“Friday night services every evening at 18:45.”

Sounds intriguing. I go to the temple.

The place is closed, all its doors locked. Nobody in. And as at the Jewish center in Munich, you wonder to yourself what this is all about.

Synagogue-with-no-Jews done, I go to see the Muslims. Marxloh, to be specific. I hook up with Mustafa and Halil at the Medien-Bunker Marxloh or, for short, Bunker. They show me a film made by the Bunker people. Here’s a demonstration in Marxloh against the G8. People are seen holding a variety of signs, reflecting what they’re demonstrating against. I read: “Free Palestine.” Free it from the Jews, I guess. At least this is the interpretation I got when I was in Qatar last year; they also wanted to Free Palestine. But we are not in Doha. How the Palestinian issue snuck into Marxloh is a puzzle to me. And in the first place, what does it have to do with the G8? Is Palestine part of the G8? Is Israel?

I don’t know and I am here to learn.

Mustafa explains to me that Israel unites the people of Marxloh, who are often divided. There are Turks here, but not only them. There are also Kurds living in the neighborhood. And these two people don’t even talk to each other. “A man can share his bread with you one moment,” says Mustafa, “and the next moment not even look in your direction—if he discovers that you are Turkish and not a Kurd,” or vice versa. But the hate of Israel unites the Turks and the Kurds of Marxloh. This is the point where their minds and emotions meet and they unite to fight this mutual enemy. Both were “enraged” at the way Israel acted with the flotilla to Gaza, he explains to me, and both took to the streets. United. In hate.

Jews again.

People here are obsessed with Jews. But I want no part of it. I leave the Ruhr area, which this year is the Culture Capital of Europe, and take the train to Düsseldorf.

Once in Düsseldorf I go to see Heine Haus. I love Heinrich Heine, the German Jew and great nineteenth-century poet, but Heine Haus, I soon enough realize, is a bookstore. The original house was demolished, they tell me, and then rebuilt, and now it’s private. There’s a café here, but it’s open only when there’s a special event. Will you open it tonight for a Public Viewing? I ask the lady who sits in front. I think it would be nice to see soccer at Heine Haus. The lady thinks I crossed the line and doesn’t even bother to respond. I leave. In the window outside, which supposedly showcases the best they have in the store, I check the display. Here’s what I see: A book about Palestine, a book about the Holocaust, and another book written by an Israeli leftist who is a strong critic of the Israeli government.

Country obsessed!

Germany will soon face Spain in South Africa. I think I should go to a Public Viewing. Better than Israel versus Palestine.

Esprit Arena is the place I choose for my Public Viewing. Tickets are between 6 and 9 euros. Why people pay money to watch TV while standing, as most here do, is not a question for me to answer. Maybe a professor of sports could explain, not me. I’m not really qualified.

The game starts. It’s obvious from the get-go that the Spanish players are better. They control the field, and the ball is mostly around
their
feet. They are also better as a team, coordinating very well with each other. The audience, quite a few thousand, seems to register this fact and is laying low. I find myself, strangely enough, hoping against hope that the German team will win. God, am I becoming German? Sadly, against my newly developed hopes, the game ends and Spain has won, Germany has lost. The audience is depressed. They brought their flags, but for nothing; some are clad with clothes made of flags, with their various noisemakers and rivers of beer—all on the assumption that Germany would win.

It is not to be.

People are crying. Some cover their faces with flags. Others lie down like defeated soldiers. They take it personally, as if they were the actual players. But more than just that: to them Germany lost, and Germany is them. The source of their pride is no longer an entity to be proud of. Their honor, their sense of worth, the core of their being has been beaten. Crushed. Here is a young man so despondent he’s kicking a wall. The big TV screen on which the game had been shown now shows a kid crying uncontrollably. This beautiful blond being, draped in the colors of the flag, just can’t stop crying. The thousands here watch. They wish to comfort the kid, but they can’t comfort even themselves. A bunch of teenagers in front of me lie on the grass of the stadium, hugging and caressing each other. The arena looks and feels as if it were a funeral home. As I point my camera at them, they ask me not to take their picture. Shouts of “Deutschland!” are not heard except from a lone lunatic who obviously didn’t get the news.

Walking back, down the streets of Düsseldorf, I notice a funeral home, a real one. In its window, for those into coffin window-shopping, there are soccer balls and German flags. The dead, it seems, didn’t get the news either.

Will be interesting to know what Helge and his wife, Maria, think of all this. He’s German, she’s Spanish. How do they view the game and its result?

Maria, wife of Helge, though they are not officially married, is much younger than Helge, who’s about twice her age. But when you listen to her talk, you realize she’s mature far beyond her years. She thinks outside of the box, she has her own ideas. For example, she tells me that Hitler hated Germany and that’s why he did what he did.

What?

“Hitler was an artist, with an artist’s mindset. Artists are not nationalist.”

Really?

“Hitler did not use his power to help people, he was thinking only about himself.

Artists, who at their root are selfish creatures, cannot be nationalist.”

I never thought about this, but she has a point. An interesting woman, Maria.

“I remember that picture of Obama with the slogan ‘Yes we can,’ and when I looked at how people worshipped him, I thought: It’s similar to what happened here, when the people worshipped Hitler. It’s the same thing. People look for a leader to worship. Back then it was Hitler, today Obama.”

Does Helge agree with her?

“I don’t think that Hitler hated Germany, or that he loved it. He did what he did because he believed in what he said and did. It was about ideas.”

You played Hitler in a German film recently, how did you prepare to play him?

“I listened to an audiotape, a tape recorded in secret by the Swedish ambassador. There Hitler is heard talking in a way that seemed strange and naïve. He talked quietly, quickly, and much. Something like, We have twenty thousand tanks . . . He didn’t raise his voice, he was just counting his tanks, planes . . . And that’s how I played him in the film.”

I tell him about the lipstick and deodorant, the story I told the students in Frankfurt. Helge says he knows it.

How do you know?

“I recognized it the moment you said it.”

How?

He gives me a long answer, but the most interesting part of it is this: “My mom was in the Bund Deutscher Mädchen [BDM].” Interesting. When I asked him about his parents earlier, he didn’t mention a word about this.

Will Germany become Nazist again?

“No.”

Why not?

“Too many Turks.”

Suddenly, don’t ask me why, I have a moment of truth and say to him:

I ask you questions about politics and some other heavy issues. But between you and me, how can you really know? In our generation we make gods out of celebrities. But, really, aren’t we nuts? I mean, should I also expect you to solve complex mathematical equations only because you made it into show business? What I am doing is senseless, isn’t it? You really don’t know any better than anybody else. Do you?

“Celebrities are businesspeople. In former times we asked these questions of Kant or other great philosophers, like Alphons Silbermann. Now we ask these same questions of Paris Hilton or Bastian Schweinsteiger [a German football player] . . . That’s why I told you: I am not giving any more interviews. You’re the last one. I am not the one to be asked these questions. Because I am one of the few who knows the answers . . .”

OK. Let’s talk personal. Did your mother talk to you about her years at the BDM?

“No. They don’t talk about those years. I saw a picture, when I was a young kid, of the Bund and in the middle of it was a man I recognized: my music teacher. I showed him the picture and asked him if that was him. He hit me on the face and threw me out. I used to get 1 in music, but after that incident I got 6.”

You carry heavy baggage, you and the German people. Don’t you?

“Yes.”

Maria breastfeeds their baby. Then she shows me to the family’s sheep. Yes, they have sheep. I love sheep! And when sheep are around I don’t talk about WM, even if my original purpose was to discuss it . . .

Helge’s manager is also here. We have a chat.

Till was born in Dresden and spent his formative years in East Germany, the GDR. He tells me that he spent twenty months in jail. Why? Because he wanted to go to West Germany. Till says he lives in the present and looks ahead to the future; he doesn’t want to revisit his past. But I push a little.