Death as a Way of Life

The Holocaust Carrier Pigeon

January 1995

This article was written specifically for German readers and was published in the German newspaper, Die Zeit, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army, on January 27, 1945.

I

It has been reported here that Germany is hoping that the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the death camps will also symbolize a historic reconciliation between the German and Jewish peoples. Holocaust survivors in Israel were outraged and protested. The approach of this significant date has again raised, with great intensity, questions about the relations between the two peoples, and about the need for, and the possibility of, reconciliation.

It’s not easy for me to address the German reader about the Holocaust. I almost always feel as if I am not saying exactly what I intend to say. There’s always some slight distortion, either of excess caution or of the opposite, overstatement.

Sometimes, instead of expressing my own private pain, I find myself speaking as a representative. Or, I address the person facing me as a spokesman. The relationships are complex, so both sides are often tempted — consciously or not — to become manipulative. For myself, I am aware to what extent insult is the dominant sentiment within me when I think about the Holocaust. Not wrath and not hatred or a desire for revenge; I am rather bitterly insulted by the fact that human beings were treated this way. I know that there is nothing like insult to trap me in puerile, helpless resentment, humiliating in itself.

On the other hand, I sometimes meet Germans who are so strangely and enthusiastically addicted to overwhelming, total feelings of guilt that any practical dialogue with them is impossible. This guilt may also make dialogue among themselves impossible. I’m similarly disgusted, incidentally, by the manner in which certain Israelis behave in their encounters with Germans. It’s as if they are declaring: “We will never withdraw from the territory we have conquered in the German conscience.” Both these approaches are unacceptable. But is there another way? Is it already possible, fifty years later, to find the right voice, a clean voice, for discussion?

II

I have frequently been invited to meetings between Israeli and German intellectuals. Twice I accepted the invitations. I used to believe that both sides have to bear the burden of what happened in the Holocaust. In a twisted way, I regarded both, the Germans and the Jews, as “partners” in a terrifying historic event, and in order to loosen the ties suffocating the souls of both nations, we now needed each other.

I no longer believe this. True, we must talk. Talking is useful even to remind ourselves of what is sometimes in doubt — that it is still possible to believe in humankind. But I feel that, to be prepared for real dialogue, each of the two parties must first learn to speak with himself. To utterly cleanse the “story he tells himself” of any idealization and demonization, and to be very much on guard against manipulation. Perhaps, to reach such clarity, both nations need to heal completely — not only from the consequences of the Holocaust, but also from the abnormality of each of their cultures and histories, which allowed the Holocaust to take place in the way that it did.

It seems to me that Israelis are now, more than in the past, able to conduct this dialogue among themselves, even if we are still at the beginning of the road. Israelis have, in recent years, done much to address painful questions. These include the arrogant insensitivity that caused Israelis to blame the Holocaust’s victims for having gone to their deaths “like lambs to the slaughter,” without defending themselves. There’s also the cruelty with which native Israelis treated the survivors in the first years of the new state of Israel — demanding in so many ways that they remain silent, that they hide themselves from public attention, that they feel shame for what they endured and for having survived.

But there are other, more challenging questions that still haven’t been touched. How did the Jewish people — as a nation and as a society — find itself trapped in a situation that allowed the extermination of a third of its population? This happened despite the fact that between 1917 and 1933 the Jews had before them the alternative of building themselves a national life and a political entity in Palestine. Why did the nation not have the power to save itself from the warped circumstances of the Diaspora before antisemitism reached its most extreme form in the Holocaust? And how can we free ourselves today from the tragic deformation that the Holocaust still dictates in so many areas of life and of consciousness? This is evident in our absolute, almost eerie insecurity about whether our children and we have a future, and in our feeling that death still shadows us, so that we are doomed to experience a life of living death.

There are other questions as well. How can we purge ourselves of our self-victimization, yet also adopt the right attitude toward the great power we have today, and toward our aggressive and cruel urges? How can we cope with our problematic perception of ourselves as a “chosen people,” when chosenness always contains an element of exclusion or even of a curse? How can a nation that perceives itself as unique and special learn to live with the trivialities of daily life, a life devoid of miracles and catastrophes? How can it finally find the right place for itself in the family of nations?

We won’t get the answers to these most piercing questions from the Germans. They aren’t equipped to respond to them. But can we, Israeli Jews, respond to the fundamental questions that the Holocaust and World War II raised among the Germans?

III

Sometimes I wonder why the Germans so desperately need the presence of an Israeli at their discussions of World War II and the Holocaust. Is it that those who want to have such discussions, yet are anxious about them, need such a presence to jump-start the process? Perhaps some unconsciously seek absolution from the Jewish representatives, an absolution that no person is permitted to ask for and no person empowered to grant? Just as in modern Jewish discourse about the Holocaust, the Germans must do the major part of the work within themselves. The fundamental questions that World War II and the Holocaust raise have no necessary connection to Jews or Israelis. The German discourse on the Holocaust is, first and foremost, an internal German one. It touches on questions of identity and memory and education, and of the still complicated attitude toward the concept of homeland (Heimat). There is also the question of antisemitic concepts in German culture and thought, of attitudes to force and militarism. These latter are especially pressing as Germany becomes the strongest power in Europe with no one to brake it except its own self-restraint. And, of course, there is also the question of Germany’s willingness and readiness to adopt democracy in its most profound way, granting legitimacy to other entities and desires.

*

A small linguistic matter catches my attention whenever I visit Europe, especially German-speaking countries. People often talk to me about “what happened then.” “Then”—that is, once, in the past, things happened, but they no longer do, it’s all over. But in Hebrew, or in Yiddish (actually, in any language that Jews use to talk about the Holocaust), people never speak of “then.” They speak of “there.” “There” indicates that in that “there”—not only in Germany, but in the range of human behavior — the thing still exists. Or happens. And in any case, it’s not over. Certainly not for us.

Because we Israelis, have almost no choice. It’s becoming clearer to us: as time passes and it is possible to approach the facts, ever more powerful tidal waves of memories and emotions flood Israeli consciousness. Only two months ago, a television program about the attempt made during the war to ransom Jews from the Nazis captivated the entire country. Dozens of broadcast hours and numerous newspaper articles were devoted to the effort. With a single touch on the button of memory, the entire Holocaust broke forth from within us with a force that caught even us by surprise. We again realized that the new generation, the so-called new Israelis — supposedly fearless, devoid of their parents’ anxieties — find themselves constantly confronting the memory of the Holocaust. They are doomed to revisit it on all levels of life, in their mental associations, in their moral choices, in their behavioral codes. Time and again, we discover that even if we reject the role, almost each one of us is a carrier pigeon for the Holocaust.

Israel does not always treat the Holocaust appropriately. Sometimes we manipulate ourselves. We turn those anxieties into a worldview and system of values. We idealize the victims, whom we often refer to as the “Holocaust martyrs.” Among our youth, we create a one-dimensional identification between Jewish experience in the Holocaust and the overall meaning of being Jewish. Tens of thousands of high school students, on the verge of their enlistment in the army, make pilgrimages to Auschwitz to discover their “roots.” For nonreligious young Jews, the Holocaust often becomes the central element in their national identity, taking up a bit of the space filled in others by religious identity. All these distortions still exist, but today’s children at least do not have to grow up with the same taboos that my generation had. That suffocating silence, from which terrifying whispers sometimes escaped, the screams of our parents’ nightmares, the rumors that our imagination could not comprehend — all were part of our lives.

IV

Israelis have no choice but to confront the Holocaust each day. I think it’s easier for Germans to ignore it. A young German can choose to take an interest, to purposely address the question of his parents’ actions. On the face of it, one can understand the natural desire many Germans have to rid themselves of the burden of “the bad times” and of the sense that all Germans will forever have to pay the price of their parents’ crimes. Perhaps this is the source of the somewhat embarrassing haste with which certain German politicians seek a kind of “instant reconciliation.”

But the burden that became unbearable during that war cannot be quickly set aside, and will certainly not disappear as a result of silence and by being ignored. It requires a very long process of identity construction and education. Today’s neo-Nazis demonstrate, in their dynamism and their drawing power, that the burden is still palpable. The German regime’s (ambivalent?) tolerance of the neo-Nazis gives the impression that, in many ways, Germany is still only at the very beginning of a real discussion of its character.

I’m trying to write in a measured and rational way, but I feel how my emotions are suddenly surging. I want to talk about the simple, concrete things that still hurt me, fifty years later. There are the Holocaust survivors who, during the Gulf War, dispersed their families to different parts of Israel “so that at least someone will survive.” I myself was only able, only brave enough to visit Germany after my name had appeared on a book cover — believing that this way no one could kill me anonymously, as a number, because now I had a first and last name in Germany. I want to write about the wild, primal fear that overcame me when the two Germanys united — and I was lying in my bed in a hotel in Mainz, listening to the cheering crowds. I need to ponder over that split second of hesitation and awkwardness I hear in the voices of Germans when they say the word “Jew,” as if the word is still prohibited. There’s also the walk I always take when I visit Munich, through the beautiful English Garden (Englischer Garten). I never walk there alone. I always take companions with me — Walter Benjamin, Kurt Tucholsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ernst Lubitsch, Franz Werfel, Alfred Döblin, Nelly Sachs, people who were once in Munich and others who never were. On these walks I always take a book written by one of them, or a memory of a poem they wrote or a film they made. We walk together and talk, and I constantly wonder, What is it like to feel like a hunted animal in the midst of all this beauty?

There are so many things to say, but I feel that in another moment I might fall into the insult trap that I mentioned before, so I must be careful. Fifty years is too short a period for the wound to heal. It’s too early to sum up, and there’s no urgent need to speak about reconciliation. After all, there is no feud between Israelis and Germans today. On the contrary, there are widespread ties in almost every area, a growing closeness and mutual curiosity. But at the tragic points of contact, the wound is still gaping. No person has the moral authority to cover it with a false bandage of ceremonies and declarations. No person has a right to decide on the date on which the scab begins to form, when the responsibility reaches its expiration date. We still have a long way to go.