Culture Corner
Heroism's Quiet Labourers: On Finding a Jewish World in Berlin

By Samuel Kessler Gilbride
New York University

It is a strange thing, really, to be afraid of a whole county. It doesn't feel very modern, very American. It has a tinge of the cloistered medieval, of an antique theology of the damned and the saved. The sun shines equally over all the earth, and people go about their lives, and being born in one place or another is no one's particular fault; all children are innocent. Afraid of a country? A hell of a lot of silliness, if you ask me.

Except Germany, of course. But that's different. Of course.

I arrived in Berlin on a cold afternoon in early February, on a day of gray clouds with a wind sweeping down eastward from the shores of the North Sea. I found my apartment and I sat on my bed for a long time and then I got up and I walked into the city. Evening had come and the sky was dark and downtown was quiet. The main avenue of Unter den Linden was almost empty. I walked through the Brandenburg Gate and I made a left along the wall of the American Embassy. The street lamps were on and a light snow had started and there were almost no tourists. I stopped at the next corner and looked out over the field of black stone boxes that are the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I felt the cold in my toes and I looked up at the sky and fear entered my heart. I felt like I was standing on death, on graves, on ashes and I didn't want to touch the ground. I wondered how I was going to walk home. I stood there for a very long time.

Of course, we say, Germany is different. Of course.

And of course, Germany is different. But with our language we brush away the fear of memory, gently skirt the consequences of dealing with what that difference means. We let Germany become a place whose reality for our lived experience ends in a classroom, in a book of terrible pictures, in a documentary, in the voice of a survivor.

But that is not all of Germany. In my sadness, my incomprehension of enormous tragedy, I had made the mistake. It is the mistake many people make, the mistake I grew up learning and the mistake much of the Jewish world continues to believe: that Judaism in Berlin is dead, that the history and beauty of German Jewry ended with the grand triumph that was the establishment of the State of Israel. From endless despair there came the miracle of light, and in our pain we rushed from the old lands to the new. We memorialized in history a life that still exists, because the hurt was too great and the shame too fresh.

The words of Ezekiel come to me, of the miracle of life embedded in the very existence of the Children of Jacob: "The hand of the Lord was upon me...and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry... ‘I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life'...They came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army...Then He said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.'"

There are an estimated twenty thousand Jews in the city of Berlin. A majority are recent Russian immigrants, families who found a democratic home and an economy in which to build a life. There are twelve synagogues, a bookstore, a mikvah, a yeshivah, restaurants and food stores. The dead of the Shoah cannot be reborn. Theirs is an eternal tragedy. But many of those who were murdered loved this land—the language, the art, the jokes and quirks and neighborhood squabbles. This we too often forget. The old world of European Jewry is over, wiped from the earth between metal jaws, sent into the sky without tears. But Berlin is still their city, the place of the streets they walked on and the parks they sat in, of their seats at the opera and in the lecture hall. The modern Jews of Berlin walk those streets, too. They live widely scattered and mostly unseen, but they are still a community. When we remember Germany, let us think sometimes of these people, of their smiling children and their Shabbos tables. Let us not be afraid because of the past. The light of their candles burns brightly, not always against the darkness of the past: sometimes as a small gift of the future.

Sam Kessler Gilbride will be starting his senior year at New York University in the fall, working toward a degree in history. Sam spent this past semester studying in Berlin, and is spending the summer in Israel. Sam is also an alumnus of the Winter 2006 Taglit-Birthright Israel program with KOACH.

[Posted 6/21/09]