I Sleep in Hitler's Room (6 page)

Where on YouTube?

Frank opens his laptop to show me the YouTube clip. It takes some time. Much time. He can’t find the clip. Maybe a Jew from Berlin has blocked him. But don’t worry. Frank has the clip on a DVD. In his house. Maybe I will come again.

“Did you see the Jew Michael Friedman? Easy to tell he is a Jew because of his hairstyle. Jews have a different hairstyle. It’s a wavy hairstyle. That’s the way the Jews have it. And Michael Friedman, a Jew, smokes all kinds of forbidden leaves as well.”

I’m delighted it’s so easy to recognize a Jew.

No, Frank is not looking for trouble, he explains. All he wants is peace and love. Unification of Germany, Austria, Denmark, and other countries is needed because they are one country, one people. It’s important to unite and protect the white race. But not the Poles. And, by the way, for the sake of honest and true history, may it be known that “Germany never invaded Poland. It’s a lie.

Honor of family, love of brother and sister, that’s what’s important. And getting rid of the Jews, once and for all. Those schemers, creatures who invented a story about some holocaust so that they could squeeze out of Germany billions of euros plus four submarines. And then, when they wanted more money, they bombed the World Trade Center and made America fight for them.”

After the Jews, Frank’s biggest enemy is the police, the German police. And, like the anarchists, he would like to see them gone. And like those on the left, all he’s really wishing for is Peace and Love.

What is most striking about Frank is that he is really a very lovely and generous person. Before coming here, people warned me of the dangers awaiting me once I crossed the entrance door to Club 88. They see the new-Nazis on TV and think they’re beasts. Little do they know. Frank, like the other people in the club, is no mass murderer. Quite the opposite: He is kind and so very welcoming. He offers free drinks, maintains constant personal attention, and is always smiling.

He likes to sing sometimes. He sings for me a little song, a romantic tune. Let me share it with you: “We have crematoriums, and in each crematorium there’s a little Jew . . .” He smiles as he sings it. He has a good voice, by the way.

And I think: Probably that’s how my family was led to death. With a song and a smile.

It’s time to leave. Frank poses for a picture with me, the American computer analyst. We shake hands and we hug. “I love my people, I love my family, and I love my land,” he says to me before I leave his place. “All I want is to protect them.”

He’s a Believer, like any churchgoer you’ll meet on Sunday morning during prayer. Both want the best for their families, both are dedicated to their beliefs, and both, it strangely strikes me just now, believe in dead Jews.

We part ways, and I go back to Hamburg.

I walk around the streets of Hamburg and ask people if they are proud to be German. Obviously I have totally lost my mind. No way back. I am on the verge of becoming a Prophet, a Revolutionary, a Philosopher, or any other incurable disease walking on two.

Are you proud to be German?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, come the answers. Not one yes.

I get into a conversation with a young woman who is married to a man who could be her grandpa. He used to be her professor, she tells me. Must be a great thinker to make her fall in love with him. I chat with the man. Are you proud to be German? I ask him. “No, of course not,” he says. We talk a little bit more. He has a few glasses of beer, I have a few Cola Lights, which is what they call Diet Coke here. And then I whisper in his ear: “You are in a dark room, all by yourself, naked. It’s a wonderful evening. An angel drops from heaven to serve you. And he asks you, the angel, ‘Are you proud to be German?’ What’s your answer?”

“Yes, I am!” The Professor says loudly.

No wonder this attractive young lady fell in love with this ancient thinker.

Who are the Germans? No clue.

Is there something “German” beyond just passport and some internationally recognized borders? Oh, Yes. Just do me a favor, please, and don’t ask me to tell you what it is. I really don’t know. The only thing I can tell you is this: I’m busy. Very busy. I’m trying to find somebody who’ll tell me that he or she is proud to be German. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I find those people, kiss them or slap them, but I think it’ll be good for my sanity.

A day later I meet Mathias. He’s Proud to be East German, he says, but can’t say Proud to be German. No way. West Germans, he tells me, drink much less alcohol than the eastern ones. I try to process it. What does he mean “less”? What happens in the east, heaven help me? They bathe in rivers made of beer? While enjoying his beer, he and his girlfriend, Evelyn, share with me their thoughts about the characteristics of the German: “Seriousness, order, unfriendliness, cleanliness.” “That’s why,” they explain to me, “the radical left is dirty . . . a protest against the ‘German.’ ”

I need to get myself a smart person, a human creature with a clear head, to get me out of the mess I find myself in. Or I’m leaving this country on the next flight out. Ash cloud or not. I’ll pay Lufthansa $9,800 to fly me to Iceland. I don’t care.

I settle for the oldest surviving German chancellor, His Honor Mr. Helmut Schmidt. The man is an icon in this country, I’m told. Works for me. It will take an icon to get me back on track.

I just open my mouth, and the Icon comments to me:

“Let me make a technical remark: I am ninety-one years old, my ears are already a hundred and one years. I understand one half of what you say. The other half I have to make up in my little computer up here, and it’s neither from Apple nor from HP, it’s from God and therefore it’s working slowly. You’re speaking much too quickly for me. Please speak slowly.”

Very slowly, as slowly as I can, I enunciate my first question to him:

Former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing said at the time that your father’s father was Jewish. Is that correct?

Hell knows why this is the first question I pose to him. As if this were my business. Or, as if I really care. But you can’t stop a tongue once it starts.

The response?

“Yes.”

And I go on, like a classical idiot:

You never said it to anybody before. Why?

“There was no reason to talk about it.”

Well, you might call Mr. Schmidt an icon. But to me, don’t laugh, he’s a Jew. Certified. This interview, strange as it might sound to your ears, is going to be a conversation between two Jews. Two Jews talking.

And the First Jew, yours truly, asks the Second Jew, your icon:

Is there a national characteristic that makes a German German?

Second Jew thinks. It takes the Jew time to answer. After two thousand years of Exile, Jews learned to be patient. So I wait until my fellow Jew comes up with an answer. Sure as the Exile, he finally does:

“You could write a whole book on that.”

Brilliant. The exact answer I was waiting for. We Jews understand each other. I patiently wait for him to elaborate.

Give a Jew time to elaborate and he takes it.

Mr. Second Jew talks to me about national language. About Literature. About Collective Memory. He tells me that nations tend to be proud of the good things in their history and that so are the Germans. “But the Germans have a series of events in their history that they are ashamed of. Take, for example, the Holocaust, one word hinting at a whole complex.”

And they live it to this day.

“The Germans,” he says, “are very cautious to form a judgment about the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, because they are afraid of being called anti-Semites.”

Plain and clear he sums it up for the First Jew:

“The Holocaust is part of the cultural heritage of the Germans, and will remain so.”

If you ever doubted whether this man was indeed a Jew, now you know for sure: A Certified Jew. Which, as is the custom between two Jews talking, brings me to ask him:

For how long will this remain part of the German heritage?

Jews, if you didn’t know by now, answer questions by asking another question. And so, to keep tradition alive, the Other Jew asks:

“I’ll give you an example: How long ago was it when the Jews of Jerusalem were exiled by Nebuchadnezzar?”

Two thousand years ago, I say.

No Jew ever accepts another Jew’s response without correcting it. And so does Rabbi Helmut:

“Twenty-five hundred years. More than twenty-five hundred years.”

Now I got the answer. If we, Jews, mourn two thousand five hundred years, let the Germans mourn at least as much. And to make sure I got it totally right, the Rabbi adds:

“The Holocaust will be remembered,” by the Germans, for “at least as long. Hundreds of years, thousands of years—it will remain. I do hope that this foreseeable future fact will lead the Germans to be extremely cautious in order to prevent any hint of repeating” such crimes.

It is another custom of the Jews, in case you are not aware of it, to apply historical events to the present, and to mix past worries with current ones. So, I ask my Rabbi to explain to me the demos in Hamburg, the violence I saw on the streets.

The Rabbi, as is dictated by rabbinical tradition, starts by proclaiming humility. He says:

“It’s not my subject to talk about, because I haven’t been there, I don’t know.” And now that we got the Humility part down pat, the Rabbi—as is always the tradition—goes on to actually answer and Spread the Knowledge. He says: “But I’ve read in the newspapers that through the Internet they have organized people from all over the place to come to Hamburg just in order to have fun in using force. Quite a few of them are not Germans. Quite a few of them are of Turkish background. Some of them are what in former generations they have called anarchists. But not ideological anarchists. Just young people who would not accept any kind of authority. You see this in the outskirts of Paris, in some quarters in London. I don’t think it’s a specific German phenomenon. It has something to do with the electronic media. If you didn’t have television, if you didn’t have the Internet, it would have been much more difficult to organize such things.”

My fellow Jew and myself, and perhaps you’ve figured it out on your own already, keep on smoking while talking. I am not really sure about the law in this country, if this behavior is legal or not, but one thing must be made clear right now: Nobody in Hamburg is going to stop two Smoking Jews. Forget it. If anybody is trying, they’ll immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. No German needs this on his or her résumé.

And so, between smokes, I ask him:

Are you proud to be German?

“I have never expressed any pride about my culture.”

Never?

“No.”

Would he like to have been part of another culture?

“Also no.”

And then, between one cigarette and another, as he prepares to bring the new cigarette to his lips while holding to soon-to-be-lit lighter, the Chain-Smoking Rabbi brags a bit about his younger years:

“I was tempted to emigrate to the US after the war. My uncle offered me a job in his factory, he offered me an empty house that belonged to him. It was real temptation,” laments the Elder Smoking Jew. Alas, he did not accept the offer.

Why?

“Because I was a German.”

This German rabbi is funny, I must say.

This calls for another cigarette.

When a Jew changes into a new cigarette, it is very important to remember, he must change the topic of the conversation as well.

Any comment about Angela Merkel? I ask my Smoking Partner.

Partner or not, Rabbi Schmidt refuses to comment, saying he has been out of politics for thirty years. But later on, when I ask how it feels to be an icon in today’s Germany, he dismisses it by saying that the real reason for his being made into an icon “has to do with the fact that the government today is not so impressive as it used to be.”

That’s Rabbinical!

Helmut is a rare combination of scholar and politician, though I am not clear which part influences which part and which is his stronger side. Hard to say. Per our agreement, he is going to read these pages, having the right to strike words off it. This will offer me a better and deeper understanding of the man. Will he go back on anything he said? But whatever he chooses to do, one thing seems clear to me: He is a man who lives history and loves it. He impresses me as someone intimately familiar with history’s often contradictory turns, extracting pleasure from minute details that others would prefer to ignore. He sits in a wheelchair, the years obviously taking their toll on him, but his mind seems to be sharp and ever alert. He enjoys his job at
Die Zeit
and speaks fondly of it. He says to me, of his paper, that “we’re totally independent. Nobody tells us what we ought to print and what not.” He takes pride in that.

As I am about to leave this Elder Jew, he comes back to the Arab–Israeli conflict. He tells me that his admiration goes to former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat but not to former Israeli president Menachem Begin.