The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 41: September 12

Today my husband and I went on a date to the Wannsee Conference house. The Conference house is on the opposite side of the German lake from where we’re living, and is a villa much like ours, save for the fact that in its dining room on January 20, 1942, Eichmann, Heydrich, Müller, and other notable Nazis gathered to draw up their official Jewish extermination plan, euphemistically referred to in the conference minutes as the “Final Solution.” (I have since learned a bit more about the history of our villa. During the war, following its seizure from a prominent Jewish banking family, our villa became the home of Hitler’s “economic guru,” a man named Walther Funk, whose work for the Third Reich earned him the name “the Banker of Gold Teeth,” a moniker referring to the practice of extracting gold teeth from concentration camp inmates so that they could be sent to the Deutsche Reichsbank — of which he was president — and melted into bullion. So the similarities between our villa and the villa across the lake, one can assume, extend beyond architecture and waterfront proximity. Though I have no doubt that the topic of extermination was, on numerous occasions, also discussed in the dining room of our villa, these remarks were unofficial enough that no museum is warranted to memorialize them.)

To get to the Conference house my husband and I biked past rowing clubs and yacht clubs and minischlosses, and along the way my mood started to tighten. I could not entirely blame Hitler. This just happens on some days, even when mass murder tourism isn’t on the date docket. We rounded the corner onto the street where the S-Bahn is located, and the mean beer-and-wurst seller I’ve made it my goal this fall to befriend, and it was as if I’d pedaled into an unpleasant new weather system. I saw my husband biking ahead of me and decided, because I had no better explanation, that he was somehow to blame for the alienation I’d been vaguely sensing all day and that had finally coalesced into the more solid (and paranoid) beginnings of a depression. By plain virtue of the fact that he existed and he loved me, he was at fault. I thought of the recent invitation he’d received to go to Paris, and of the many readings he’s giving in Germany and elsewhere in the upcoming weeks. Here, in this country, at this villa, I am a spouse; literally, this is how I am referred to on the villa itineraries he has received, i.e., “dinner for fellows and spouses.” My spousehood even required documentation. We had to produce a marriage certificate in order to secure my official welcome. (Apparently many people try to pose as the spouses of fellows; the fakes must be ferreted out.)

None of this, until today, had bothered me.

We arrived at the Wannsee Conference house; we parked our bikes. Standing in the beautiful gardens, reading the history of the villa on a placard, I was struck — as most people who visit the villa, at least according to the placard, are struck — by the uncomfortable collision of “idyll and violence.” This made me think of my husband’s and my favorite movie, an Austrian film in which a lakeside summerhouse is invaded by murderers who first toy with the family before killing them one by one, including the child. Years ago, when we were first dating, we rented this movie — from a Maine video store stocked with old blockbusters and about six foreign films — knowing none of the plot in advance. The title was in German, the blurbs and the descriptions were in German. We met this movie cold.

In the gardens, I made mention to my husband that possibly the director of this movie we’d seen so many years ago had been thinking of the uncomfortable collision of idyll and violence prompted by the likes of the Wannsee house. If I’d been a critic in Austria or Germany writing about this movie when it first came out (in 1997), I’m sure I would have thought about idylls and violence, and how, not so long ago, many people were hanging out in lake houses or regular old houses while elsewhere people were definitely not doing that.

What I was not saying but trying to say: We are on a sort-of date at the Wannsee Conference house, but I am struggling not to feel really alone here, and also not to be angry at you for absolutely no reason. This movie is important to my husband and to me. It signals that we had a history of liking things together, and of seeing the world similarly. I needed reminding of that.

But I also wanted confirmation that my inexplicable, unjustifiable resentment of him was explicable and justified. I was fairly committed to this mood I was in; I less wanted to overcome it than I wished to stumble upon an excuse to more fully realize it. So I lay in wait. There was no escaping me. My husband said of my observation about idylls and violence, “That’s not what that movie was about.” Then he told me what the movie was about. This, at least, is how I chose to interpret his response.

I grew indignant. As if I needed anyone to tell me what that movie was about! I recalled another movie we’d watched together in our early days, in which a New Age character says to his non — New Age dinner guest, “That’s funny, you’re telling me about chakras.”

This was my inner chorus as we walked through the Wannsee Conference house and took pictures of anti-Semitic children’s books. That’s funny you’re telling me about chakras. That’s funny you’re telling me about chakras. I also sensed — or wished to sense, in the interests of fully realizing my bad mood — an increasing emotional divide between us. My husband stopped talking to me; he wandered off on his own. This sounds ridiculous, and is ridiculous, but I decided that my husband believed he had a deeper connection to the material and the exhibit because he is half-Jewish and I am (possibly) not Jewish at all.

In my head, I started a fight with my husband. I argued in favor of my possible Jewishness, and thus my right to walk around the museum as his equal. The spelling of my last name was created on Ellis Island, and only the direct descendants of my great-grandfather have the exact arrangement of letters; phonetically, however, there exist many potential “relatives” in the States, and every one of these potential relatives is Jewish. I am occasionally contacted by members of these phonetically identical families whose names are spelled “Shulawitz” or “Jewelowicz;” they say, “I heard you mentioned on the radio. I thought perhaps we might be related.” Recently I was asked to be on a panel; when I declined, the organizer said, “Could you possibly recommend another female Jewish novelist?”

(Also — this is unrelated yet somehow not — Hitler and I share a birthday. This has always made me suspect that people subsconsciously believe I am somehow complicit in the killing of Jews. It has also made me vigilant with myself. According to the laws of horoscopes, I might be an enthusiastic organizer possessed of incredibly bad ideas. Every instance of group inspiration requires a gut check. What are the possibly really negative long-term ideological ramifications of this Fourth of July parade float? If I were Jewish, I would be relieved of a great deal of probably pointless self-doubt.)

I trailed my husband. I continued our heated dispute to which only I was party. In my head I said to him: Does having two one-quarter Jewish children give me rights to a Jewish connection? Did the failure in the 1970s of Portland, Maine’s WASPiest law firm to hire my father, maybe because he was presumed to be Jewish (“How was your holiday?”) give me rights to that connection? What about the fact that my best friend in graduate school so believed I was Jewish that she mocked me for being a Jewish denier, and would pick up from my desk the old daguerreotypes of my just-off-the-boat-in-nineteen-oh-whatever relatives on my mother’s side, the schnozzy Dabelsteins, and point at them and say, grinningly, and with fake credulity, Not Jewish!, and then point to photos of my dark-haired father and dark-haired brother and exclaim with the same expression and intonation, Not Jewish! The name “Julavits,” as she likes to point out, is doubly Jewish. My name, she says, is basically Jewjew.

I followed my husband into the dining room. Aptly, the question of defining Jewishness was a primary preoccupation of the Wannsee Conference. The conference minutes are basically dedicated to solving the problem of who counts as Jewish, who only partially counts as Jewish, and who does not count as Jewish at all. Proposals for determining the sub-, and sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-“degrees” stretched, under glass, on side-by-side typed sheets of paper, the circumference of the large room. For example:

(2) TREATMENT OF PERSONS OF MIXED BLOOD OF THE SECOND DEGREE

Persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be treated fundamentally as persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which the persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be considered as Jews:

(a) The person of mixed blood of the second degree was born of a marriage in which both parents are persons of mixed blood.

(b) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew.

(c) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a particularly bad police and political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew.

In my head I argued my case to my husband: all of my fully Jewish friends think I’m Jewish! (2c, “behaves like a Jew”). Some of my nearest relatives appear to be Jewish! (2b, “racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew”). The first guy who ever went down on me was Jewish! (Certainly this “deportation”-worthy transgression was covered somewhere in the minutes.)

Afterward, my husband and I biked to the grocery store. I was feeling excluded, still, and wanted to address that feeling of exclusion by highlighting how totally not Jewish I supposedly was (wasn’t?), and how far apart from one another my husband and I were on this date. I tested; I poked. I remarked on the malevolent stylishness of Hitler, and that I understood how people were (to tragic ends) seduced by his aesthetic bombast and precision. My husband said that Hitler’s aesthetic didn’t appeal to him at all. By this he was saying (I thought) that he was better than those people who found it seductive. That he was better than me, because I claimed to understand how a person, back in the day, might, at their peril, be seduced.

I cited the many scholarly books written on Nazi style by people who were smart and knowledgeable; on the basically irrefutable intellectual proof that the Nazis were aesthetically intoxicating, to which he said, quite innocently and also correctly, “I just don’t think that anyone would join the Nazis because of the way the party looked.” At which point (we were now in the berry aisle at Kaiser’s, our local supermarket chain) I blew. I said, Of course I wasn’t saying that people joined the party just because they liked the uniforms and the fucking interior decor. I accused him of reducing everything I said to the claims of a simpleton; that he refused to have a conversation with me, or a discussion with me, that he was only interested in staking out his belief territory, and in so doing relegating me to a belief territory that was boneheaded and morally weak (I might have been seduced!). I was trying to talk to him and to emotionally engage with him (by attacking him, but whatever); he, meanwhile, just wanted to tell me who he was, or who he’d have been, in the face of Hitler. He was defining himself apart from everyone, but especially apart from me.

My husband was totally surprised, as he often is when I explode like this. I tend to give no hint of disturbance until I am massively and performatively disturbed. He was also mortified that this fight should be happening in Kaiser’s, and within earshot of many English-speaking Germans. He said in a low voice, “Please, let’s not fight about Hitler.” (The other day he said to me, “Please, let’s not fight about military time.”)

I countered that this “fight” had nothing to do with Hitler; that he’d started behaving like an intellectual separatist while we were talking about movies in the Conference house gardens. I told him I had been really insulted when he’d told me what the movie we’d watched many times together was “about.”

“I know what that movie’s fucking about,” I said.

As he must do in these situations — What else is there to do save divorce me? I really did pick a fight with him the other day about military time — he approached me calmly. He tried to offer an honest, outsider perspective. He promised that he hadn’t committed any of the crimes I’d pinned on him. He said, quite objectively, “I think you’re just looking for reasons to be offended.”

He really did not offer this observation accusatorially. He offered it kindly, as an explanatory diagnosis that might provide me some relief. It didn’t give me relief, but it did give me pause. Was I looking to be offended? I knew I was in a terrible mood. A terrible yet officially documented spousal mood. At the admissions desk at the Wannsee Conference house, my husband whispered that he’d been invited to speak at the Wannsee Conference, and I’d missed the joke entirely. My response was: Really? He’d been invited to speak there, too? And I hadn’t been? I wanted to say to him: I’m not looking to be offended. I’m really not looking. It’s just that when I opened my eyes today, offense was all that I could see.