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The Stone of Sisyphus

Germany

A stench of sewage pollutes the streets of East Berlin; exposed wires dangle ominously; uncollected garbage spills into sunless, dilapidated courtyards. The graffiti scrawled across walls speaks of uneasy transition layer upon layer of a still-stratified past. "Nazi lives here!" accuses one notice painted on an apartment building. "Attack fascism!" orders another. "Defend squatters' rights!" commands a third. The developers from the West are moving in, juxtaposing restored nineteenth-century facades and modern cubes of steel and glass with the decrepit cinderblock construction of the German Democratic Republic. Some of the residents are angry.

But the development frenzy cannot silence the airy whisperings of unquiet ghosts that can be heard, should one care to listen, in the hundreds of empty spaces that pockmark the city: in memory holes that have never been plugged, either by choice, in order to mark the terror of the Nazi era, or by default, as in the East, where the continuing presence of bombed-out structures and vacant lots was for decades useful anti-fascist propaganda.

It is these whisperings I have come to hear, these memory holes I have come to explore. And finally, after months of planning, I have arrived in the country that has for years been a source of personal uneasiness. Ever since I first realized the magnitude of the Holocaust and understood my own life as part of a swell of survival I am the daughter of Canadian-born Jewish parents Germany has felt forbidding and ominous. In the 1960s, when I was inexperienced and ignorant of history, I crossed the border from France into Germany several times to visitFreiburg, in the region of the Black Forest a city that charmed me. That was before I visited Natzweiler-Struthof, the Nazi death camp in the nearby Vosges mountains; in any case, I was young enough then to feel closer to the Brothers Grimm than to Auschwitz. And I had not been back in the country since.

Now it is 1997, and I have learned over the years, in excruciating detail, what happened here between 1933 and 1945 and struggled to understand how and why. Part of this exploration has been about memory about how calamitous events, such as the Holocaust, are shaped in the collective story of perpetrator nations, how ordinary people remember and what they tell their children. I have come here with the understanding of one who has studied the facts and now seeks deeper answers.

My plan is to start in Berlin in East Berlin, to be precise, where the old Jewish community of the city used to live and then to travel in search of the memories and the whisperings. Here in Germany, as elsewhere, some of my itinerary is planned and some is not. People tell me things. Or I just follow my nose.

Memory: the pre-war Jews of Berlin once the centre of German-Jewish life were deported long ago, but in an indefinable way their vibrant world remains both occult and palpably evident. Thanks to Joel Levy, a former American diplomat who now heads the German branch of the Ronald E. Lauder Foundation, which funds the reconstruction of Jewish life in Europe, I am staying in a partially rebuilt, once-famous building, the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse in the erstwhile East, that feels to me like the epicentre of that peculiar ambiguity. When Levy invited me to stay here, in one of two or three available guest rooms, I accepted with alacrity: I thought rightly, as it turns out that I would not get much closer to the past than in a place that housed so many ghosts.

The Neue Synagoge was built in 1866, with thirty-two hundred seats, and for seventy years this stately palace-like synagogue embodied the excitement and bourgeois pride of the new Jewish Reform movement, which had embraced the modernity of the Enlightenment by casting off the embarrassing, outmoded forms of orthodoxy that differentiated Jews from their fellow Germans. In the Neue Synagoge, Jews practised their religion just as their compatriots, who happened to be Lutherans, practised theirs. They were proud Germans of the Jewish persuasion. But the synagogue was destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and for the next fifty years, the charred ruins were left untouched by the East German government (along with other destroyed buildings), as presumed evidence of Western, fascist brutality: until 1988, that is, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) entered its final death throes. That was the year Communist Party chief Erich Honecker promised to help finance the reconstruction of the famous landmark. (Since he was about to leave for a visit to the United States, he might have been hoping the gesture would help him overseas.) The government in Bonn also contributed funds, and the building's foundations were redone. Then, on November 9, 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht the night the yellow-red flames of burning Jewish homes and businesses illuminated the Berlin night sky a commemoration was held at the partially reassembled site.

That the reconstruction was merely partial seems deliberate and symbolic like a Japanese haiku that forces the reader, or in this case the visitor, to imagine the rest. Half recalled, blurred, wispy, irretrievable, the building is here yet not quite here; it exists, and parts of it are once again in use, but it is now manifestly a museum and a pointer to the past. There is also a notable police presence, which unintentionally evokes both past and present. Every time I leave or re-enter the building, I pass through a metal detector and show my passport to the same suspicious-looking guards, who seem never to recognize me. A plaque to Kristallnacht on the outside wall attracts a steady stream of passers-by: they stop to read with looks of consternation on their faces. Before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, few West Germans knew this place.