European Judaism

European Judaism is almost forced to turn to the German scene from time to time. The various shifts and changes in this heartland of Europe require continuous observation, even though each observer brings a different point of view to this periodical. There is too much to report, and we can only gain glimpses of what may be emerging. However, the very difference of these reports, which often disagree with each other, ultimately result in a richer panorama that will challenge our readers. Of course, the writings may reflect more of each author's 'personal agenda': that, too, may be enlightening.

'What am I doing here?' During the preparation for this conference, 'Feeling at home in exile', I was able to accept the invitation to give a lecture, but for various reasons was not in a position to provide a clever title for it. When this proposal came I simply accepted and thought, something will turn up. Since then I have become more sceptical. At any rate, the theme 'majority and minority' should run through the text. But perhaps I will begin by explaining something of the circumstances in which the following text came about. If some degree of self-irony is to be found within it, I will be quite content.

These days, the old Europe is moving towards its final curtain call. The war in the Balkans is a spectre which repeats and concludes all that happened in the last century; and a ghostly farce unrolls before us. Concepts like war and peace, the rights of nations, humanity and human rights are the conceptual covers of a happening now ripening into fateful maturity. Its primary causes were a tactical holding back, a lack of knowledge of the real circumstances, secret and openly expressed prejudices, and a shabby mentality of 'not getting involved'. As a result of this, all structures are being destroyed.

The invitation to describe 'My Germany' is an invitation to describe my life. It is a chance to reflect on the country in which I have lied since my birth. However, it seems that the conspicuous presence of a single possessive pronoun brings my reflection to a halt even before it has begun. For it is this country in which I felt like a bird in a cage for more than half of my adult life. And it is this country that I always dreamed of leaving forever. Now, I think, as I grow older the desire to escape or fly away has dissolved into a feeling of resignation and of mild satisfaction, mixed with a sense of hesitating to my German-ness and I feel that I can reflect on it with a calm mood.

The word 'identity' actually means 'absolute sameness'. Here, one speaks of 'self identity' or 'social identity'. Sharon Macdonald describes social identity as 'allegiance to people, group and often, place and past'. With regard to this topic we would rather say that identity is the process of assimilating to a norm regarded as given and static.

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.

During the summer of 1999 the 'Süddeutsche Zeitung' ran a long series of articles entitled 'The Future in the Present'. This text (Number 28 in the series, somewhat altered) was entitled Der Bär kann noch viel Lernen – The Berlin bear still has a lot to learn.

The phenomenon of the Court Jew does not cease to fascinate us. Our attention is at first drawn by the contrast of Jews as advisers and confidantes to princes and monarchs, not infrequently in a kingdom or duchy which otherwise forbade residence to Jews, or, if it did allow it, segregated them in ghettos with the concomitant disabilities that results from such a status. The image of these court factors (Hoffaktor, Hofjude) is further enhanced by their use of the trappings of the eighteenth century nobility, while, more often than not, they not only adhered to the faith of their fathers, but actively worked for and interceded on behalf of their co-religionists.

As the unification of contemporary Europe becomes a reality, new questions arise about a common cultural identity. In this context, research on a common European Jewish heritage has achieved wide public interest. Involving economic and political, cultural and religious, social and academic questions, the history of the Hoffaktoren, as they were called in German, was not constrained by European borders. It is the history of those entrepreneurs, bankers, politicians and diplomats, who served their princes throughout seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, which serves perfectly as a research field relating to European identity. Though centred on Germany, Austria and Holland, the history of the Court Jews had a decisive influence on many other countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Italy, England and Ireland

The great catastrophes of history can be recognised through the paralysed silence which they leave in their wake, a silence which frequently is broken only to make way for the falsifications of memory. BEtween silence and falsification, a third path may be opened. For those who are capable of it, this path involves saying what happened, writing in the first person. This third possibility is doubly valorised. First of all, it offers a public testimony. It allows a truth which is unspeakable or not to be spoken to erupt onto the social scene. Secondly, it is meant to have a cathartic function. The author of the testimony would in this way be unburdening himself o a horror too heavy to bear. Put into words, his suffering would become something which could be shared. It is this sharing which will be discussed here, its power to grant peace. One may doubt this power.

This is not the kind of lecture which old-fashioned German academics would present. It is much more a statement about my own 'learning' in the field of JCM trialogue: interfaith work amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims. Preparing my lecture I went through the writings of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Raimundo Panikkar, John B. Cobb, Hans Küng and Jonathan Magonet again. I felt that most of the ideas and suggestions these great scholars of interreligous theology have made will be addressed directly or 'along the way' when I give you a rather personal account of my own interfaith pilgrimage: how my spirituality, my theology and my work have changed.

The Annual Jewish-Christian-Muslim Student conference, jointly organised by the Leo Baeck College, the Hedwig Dransfeld Haus and the Deutsche Muslim Liga (Bonn), celebrated its twenty-seventh anniversary with a reflection on the theme of the Millennium – or rather the different 'ages' of the three monotheistic religions. The speakers were asked to reflect on where their religions were in terms of their historic development and where they were personally in their own religious lives.

Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this conference. Because the subject of your conference is so very important, I feel I need to begin with a caveat: I am not a Holocaust scholar. As a university professor, I have devoted myself to international law and international human rights law rather than Holocaust studies, which has emerged, at least in the United States, as an academic discipline all of its own.

'If God does not exist, and never existed, then why do we miss him so?' This question is asked by Istvan Sors-Sonnenschein, a young Hungarian Jewish ex-Communist of his grandmother, Valeria, just after his release from three years in prison in 1959. It is a scene in the much discussed, recent Istvan Szabo film Sunshine which chronicles the history of four generations of a Hungarian Jewish family from the late nineteenth century to the present. After having been imprisoned for speaking openly about the moral corruption of the Communist regime in which he served as a member of the secret police, Istvan has returned to the spacious, comfortable family home of his grandparents to find it filled with strangers.

Finding the Words

The Creation of the World

Night Funeral

Cowboy Rules

Desert Ships

For Three Killed by Stalin

First Edward

Bagels without Lox

Tree

Hubris

Unfinished Poem

Yael

God said Amen, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, Vermont, Jewish Lights, June 2000, 32 pp., $16.95, ISBN 1-58023-080-6

University Over the Abyss: The story behind 485 lecturers and 2309 lectures in KZ Theresienstadt 1942-1944, Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov, Victor Kuperman, Jerusalem, Verba Publishers, 2000, 472 pp., £20, ISBN 965-424-035-1

Ein Grundstück in Mitte: Das Gelände des künftigen Holocaust-Mahnmals in Wort und Bild. Editors: Rikki Kalbe and Moshe Zuckermann, Berlin and Tel Aviv, Wallstein Verlag, 2000, 93 pp., DM38, ISBN 3-89244-400-5

Random Harvest: The Novellas of Bialik, translated by David Patterson and Ezra Spicehandler, Westview Press, 1999, 299 pp., $28, ISBN 0-8133-6711-3