A 2007 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette OpEd: Germans and Jews Today

Sunday Forum: Germans and Jews today

The relationship is complicated and RUDOLPH H. WEINGARTNER finds that nostalgia is part of it

Sunday, August 19, 2007

In 1995 I returned to Heidelberg, invited by the city as one of its former Jewish inhabitants. On the Friday evening, the arranged program took us to a service at the then newly built synagogue, at considerable distance from the center of town where the old one had stood. (That building, having been burned down on Crystal Night, is now reduced to a well-kept empty lot hosting a memorial plaque.)

Rudolph H. Weingartner (rudywein@pitt.edu) is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His latest book is "A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education" (Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).

Given that the new synagogue is quite large and expensively detailed, I asked a (non-Jewish) Heidelberg acquaintance, why so? -- given that the Jewish congregation was quite small.

"The state," she replied with a wicked smile, "was willing to contribute substantially to the building, provided the synagogue would be quite impressive."

The state clearly wanted to make a statement; but what is it they wanted to say? At the time, I did not think much about it and simply assumed it was yet another instance of expiation of past guilt. But further observations, a more recent visit to Germany, and some reflection led me to think that things are more complicated.

The last Germans who might actually have been guilty vis-a-vis Jews are the grandparents of the current generation, a cadre that is rapidly disappearing. Many members of subsequent generations, agreeing that some of their forebears (especially if they were dead) were guilty of heinous crimes, question that they should also bear the burden of that guilt.

As individuals, they are surely right, in spite of the Biblical dictum, "the sins of the fathers ..." German society, however, a continuous quasi-organism, of which these individuals are "components," does have obligations. (Just as ours does, recent Supreme Court decisions to the contrary notwithstanding, toward the descendents of those whom our ancestors enslaved.)

The state of Baden-Wurtemberg was no doubt acting in behalf of German society, as do other states and cities in the erection of numerous memorials to Jews throughout Germany.

But there is much more to the current relationship of Germans toward Jews and Judaism. To begin with, enough time has passed since the period before Germany became a Nazi state, for there to be a historical awareness of what had transpired during the century before then. In that period Jews in Germany never numbered more than about half a million out of a population of about 65 million at the end of this pre-Hitler period.

Nevertheless, members of that tiny fraction made signal and recognized contributions in a large range of activities, as jurists, physicians, journalists, academics -- from the humanities to the sciences -- and as leading members in other professions and, of course, in commerce. These folks are now missed.

But the prominence of Jews in additional domains suggests another dimension of current German attitudes: Jews were active in music and the arts, in theater and film, as popular writers, and as entertainers of various kinds.

In a country that was culturally very homogeneous -- and thus very unlike America -- Jews provided a kind of spice, an interesting exotic element, while remaining essentially middle class, seldom venturing outside the bounds of gentility and the broad framework of German culture. It was a case of having your cake and eating it too, if for a period of less than a century.

One component, as I see it, in the current German attitude toward Jews is a nostalgia for a complex condition that, in effect, few if any alive today had themselves actually encountered. And no doubt this experiential gap adds a mythic element to the object of this nostalgia.

Evidence? On my 2006 trip to Heidelberg, we were asked to speak to high school students about our families' lives before emigration. I never taught a class that was so attentive and as active with questions, an experience equaled by my colleagues.

Further, besides those many modest monuments and memorials dotted throughout Germany, the number of Berlin streets bearing the names of Jews, famous and not so, is astonishing. Then there are the different types of schools of Jewish studies that have been established in Germany, capable of serving a far larger student body than there are eligible Jews living in Germany. Non-Jews attend.

One of these institutions, Abraham Geiger College attracted national and, indeed, international, attention when, last fall, it ordained its first three graduates as liberal (reform) rabbis --the first in 60 years in Germany. More to the point I want to bring out, that ceremony was attended by none other than Horst Kohler, president of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland!

Many in Germany -- and many surely not: there is also anti-Semitism -- want the German cake leavened by Jews who once made such a contribution. But the German Jews who played that role are dying out: I was 12 when I left there in 1939 and am 80 now.

The largest number of Jews living in Germany now came there from Russia and, if my small sampling gives me an accurate reading, a large proportion of these immigrants mostly keep to themselves, living apart from German society. No doubt, to a significant degree that is their own doing. We know from our own history here that the first generation of newcomers bands together, venturing as little as possible into "established" society.

But then I suspect that not enough is done by Germans to counteract such isolationism. I surmise, further, that specifically Jews that had been brought up in Germany are the object of the nostalgia I detect, Jews that had already been domesticated. Well, that process of integration, such as it was, took several centuries and depended on its success, such as it was, on the actions of Germans -- just as those Germans were able to nullify it in a thrice.

Nostalgia, in the end, can never be gratified, since the past cannot be brought into the present. If Germans desire to add Jewish seasoning to their culture, they will have to make major efforts to reach out to those Jews who live there and they will have to accept the new flavors that future integration will bring. To paraphrase our recently resigned secretary of defense, "You make do with the Jews you have."

First published at PG NOW on August 17, 2007 at 9:34 pm