Visiting Berlin on a Europe trip, I’m confronted head-on with many of the topics I’ve been grappling with for months.
Meeting Germans, some of the nicest and most open-minded people I’ve met, in a city steeped with culture. Knowing that they had a similar reputation before they started two World Wars and killed tens of millions of people.
Coming off a leg of the trip that involved spending time with my close-minded and supremacist parents, surrounded by similarly-minded Israelis, all steeped in their own versions of propaganda, misinformation, and fundamentalist beliefs.
As a child, I was raised to believe that there was Good and there was Evil. Esau hates Jacob. Germany is biblically ordained to hate Jews. We don’t visit Germany. We don’t buy German products. Boycott, divest, sanction.
I have since learned that Jews can create their own genocides, their own mass-murders, and their own propaganda. That they can build their own walls. That they can justify their actions with the need for more living space.
I have since learned that nobody sets out to fight against evil that is not at their doorstep. America did not join the war to liberate the camps or fight Nazis. I know this because they stayed neutral for as long as possible and because they seem quite comfortable harboring both Nazis and their own deeply entrenched racist beliefs.
I also recognize that no one would come to save the Jews if they were being oppressed in another country, just as no one is coming to save the Palestinians and no one is coming to save the Ukrainians.
***
I met a woman in Berlin, Sofiya. Originally from Russia, she fled to Berlin with her husband after Russia invaded Ukraine, so he could avoid the draft. She told me she actually had Israeli citizenship as well – automatically granted by the Israeli government because her father was Jewish. She joked that she was collecting shitty citizenships.
I shared with her how I am ashamed of telling people I’m from Israel. She commiserated. She feels the same about telling people she’s Russian, she said, especially since Germany has many Ukrainian refugees. Shitty citizenships indeed.
***
Evil, points out Hannah Arendt, is not a complex or deep-rooted thing.
It is not spiritually predestined, as my father would have us all believe.
It is quite easy to foster, as can be seen in America’s devolution into totalitarianism in a matter of months.
Arendt was simultaneously supportive of the need for Jewish self-defense, and critical of partitioning Israel and the dangers of creating a nation-sate.
***
I was reading about Eli Wiesel and his outspoken advocacy for human rights (and for illegal settlements in Jerusalem, citing the bible as justification). How, when Israel was going to host a forum about the Armenian Genocide, Turkey got angry, threatened Turkish Jews, and Israel did everything in its power to shut down the conference.
Wiesel withdrew his participation and encouraged others to do the same because, as he said, “One life is more important than anything we can say about life.” I hear his point. I only wonder what would his, and the state of Israel’s, stance be if the conference they were pressured to cancel was one about the Holocaust.
All I ask is for consistency.
The more civilized Berlin presents itself as, and the more unhinged my family, Jewish friends, and conservative Americans become, the more the ground upon which my mind tries to establish a basic sense of equilibrium and safety, crumbles.
I tried visiting the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, but it was closed for renovations.
