I Sleep in Hitler's Room

by Tuvia Tenenbom

  Jewish women can get very tough. You better obey them.

  That’s how I find myself listening to Göring testifying.

  He is asked: Did you know about the mass murder of Jews?

  No, he did not. The man had no clue. Didn’t see, didn’t hear. This is one of his last comments on earth, his last will and testament to the German nation. He didn’t know. Total news to him. Nobody told him. Nobody knew, especially him.

  Like Daniela’s father.

  Let me run out of this place!

  To the DB museum, right now! Trains are better than Nazis.

  Let me see the First Train Ever!

  First train, says the DB man standing at the info desk of the DB museum, was in Manchester, in 1824. The first one in Germany was in 1835, and that one was the world’s fifth. In this museum you can see a 1953 replica of a train built in 1935, which itself is a replica. The original was sold in parts in 1851 to a textile factory in Augsburg.

  He says, he knows.

  There you go. I came to Nürnberg for nothing.

  But kill me, I am not leaving. I made the trip, am here already, so let me see trains. Original. Replicas. Whatever. Every ancient church in this country is also a replica. Big deal.

  First things first: At the entrance to this museum there is a welcome sign, on shiny glass. The DB welcomes you. Me. In many languages, including two Semitic ones. The Welcome in Hebrew, interestingly, has three mistakes in it. This could be a Guinness record, I believe. Some of the letters don’t even belong here.

  How could the DB make so many mistakes in one “Welcome”?!

  Well, I’m the last one who should complain. I paid only 10 euros for my ticket to Nürnberg. The “Welcome” in Arabic, by the way, is well written. Not one mistake.

  I guess Arab tourists buy the 75-euro tickets.

  That must be the reason. After all, the Germans, as far as I know, know very much about Israel, the Jews, and everything in between. So how can they make such a huge mistake? Because I bought the cheap ticket. Makes total sense.

  Hey, look here! It’s the train car of King Ludwig. What a beauty! I would love to be a king. And here is the Adler train, the replica of the replica. I don’t know about you, but I think this train puts DB’s new ICE (Intercity Express) trains to shame. What an eye-catcher! Yes, the new trains ride faster, but the old ones were such beauties! No wonder they were slower—nobody ever wanted to get off! Not just the trains themselves, the stations as well. Look at the Centralbahnhof (Central station) sign, at the end of the Adler line. They have a drawing of a station. Amazingly well done, my Germans! Has great depth to it, looks real. Better than some paintings in the best of museums. Sorry. I keep on staring at it. Sit next to it. It is alive. Really good!

  I keep on going, delighted like a cat with fresh cream.

  Oh no! Without warning I arrive at the Deutsche Reichsbahn (Third Reich’s train) section. The Nazis again! I run out. Enough with the Nazis. Get over it already!

  •••

  I go to the Frauenkirche, I still owe a prayer for the Munich students.

  There is a huge poster inside, announcing a big event in the church. Something about a pogrom. What kind of pogrom? Against Jews. Jews again? Yes. When did the pogrom take place? In 1349.

  Can’t leave the Jews alone. Ever.

  I’ve had enough with the Jews. I’m walking out.

  I am looking for a Leberkäse. But what I find instead is the Way of Human Rights, a thirty-pillar memorial. Poor Germans. People shove the World War II period in their faces every opportunity that comes by. Those people, what irony, are the Germans themselves—in this case, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which commissioned this memorial.

  I hear there’s a torture chamber under the Rathaus (city hall). Maybe I should go and visit it. Seems like a good break from all this Holocaust business. But the chamber is closed. What I find instead is Mr. Amano, of the Amano jewelry store. Amano, a Sri Lankan, came to Germany thirty years ago. Today he has two stores in the old city and is “sitting pretty.”

  We are in a coffee shop next to one of his stores. People are watching the start of the WM (World Cup) on the big TV screen, but Amano is not interested. He tells me that he loves the Germans.

  What makes them so good?

  “They think a lot.”

  And he likes that. He also likes that his German clients make him rich.

  “Do you know what was the first sentence I ever spoke in German?” he asks me.

  No.

  “Why are you so serious?”

  And what was the response?

  “They got even more serious.”

  He shares with me the facts of his life, which is his business:

  “Ninety-nine percent of the people who buy in my store are men. Mostly repeat clients. Some men buy for more than one woman. If a man says to me, ‘Give me three rings and three necklaces and make sure they’re not the same color,’ I know he has more than one woman. The most expensive items that men buy are for their girlfriends. The wives get the cheaper jewelry. My clientele is made up of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and industrialists. Most of my clients are Germans, but sometimes I have Arabs and Turks. They always ask for a discount!”

  And then he adds: “Abrahamic religions are crazy. There’s no difference between Christians, Muslims, or Jews. I’m not religious. I’m a Buddhist and I follow Buddha’s teachings.”

  Why do you follow him, if you’re not religious?

  “Because he’s smart.”

  And Nietzsche is not?

  “He was a sad man, a negative man.”

  Are there no more happy smarts, other than Buddha?

  Here Amano gets lost.

  “What would you like to drink?” he asks. “It’s on me.”

  On the street nearby is a truck with a sign of the State Theater Nürnberg and a picture of a woman stabbing herself with a knife, blood dripping on her white dress. In other parts of the world this image could serve as an icon of the local mental hospital. Here it is for the locals, the normal people.

  I go back to the train station and board the next train out.

  •••

  In Lichtenfels station, the train makes a long stop. I get off for a few minutes and look around. Graffiti all over. “Multi-Kulti nein Danke.” “Frei Sozial und National.” (No to Multiculturalism. Free, Socialist, and National [far-right battle cries]).

  Where am I going?

  To a Turnfest in Coburg, at Castle Ehrenburg. There, I’m told, they celebrate one hundred fifty years of the Deutscher Turnverein. I have no clue what it is, but hopefully I’ll find out. When I get there, the first thing I find is Joachim Herrmann, the Bavarian minister of the interior. A funny, tall man with the voice of a cantor.

  What does it mean to be Bavarian? I ask him.

  Sometimes I ask questions that are not very intelligent. Happily for me, Joachim doesn’t mind. He’s a politician and will answer any question you come up with.

  “A thousand-year-old history,” he says. “And self-consciousness. Bavarians feel that they are the special, beautiful part of Germany.”

  I am not sure I really understand. I tell him that.

  “We are more conscious of our tradition than other parts of Germany are. We are also more religious than the rest of Germany.”

  How about beer? Do Bavarians drink more beer than the rest of the Germans do?

  “Maybe a little more.”

  Personally, how much do you drink?

  “Not much.”

  And on holidays?

  “Never more than two masses.” (Mass, or maß, is a glass of beer containing one liter.)

  Now that I know all, I just shut up. Nothing else pops into my head. This is a situation that in journalism school they teach you to avoid at all cost, but life is not a university. Luckily, my man goes on.

  “In Bavaria we love our country.”

  You display the flag highe
r than the other Germans do?

  “The Bavarian flag.”

  How about the German flag?

  “During soccer games.”

  “The German flag,” I repeat, as if I won’t be able to sleep tonight unless I know all the details about raising and displaying the German flag.

  Are you proud of the German flag?

  “We are proud of our Bavarian flag.”

  This man is certainly a qualified politician. He can’t answer a question straight.

  Would you like to be the German chancellor one day?

  “No. I want to stay in Bavaria.”

  Me too. At least in this place. There are so many sandwiches on the tables all around, all looking so delicious, and each smiling at me, begging that I let them into my mouth.

  I came here because Christof, a man I truly respect and trust, told me that in Coburg they have a Turnfest, which, he explained to me, was a gym competition.

  It sounded bizarre and I said: Yes, I’ll go. I never heard about gym competitions before. Soccer, yeah. I understand soccer: You raise the German flag and you feel good. But what is a gym competition? It sounded good. I hadn’t been to the gym for about a decade and I feel guilty about it. Maybe I’d feel better in that department if I went to a gym competition. I’d stay a few hours in Coburg, see people do push-ups, and get over the guilt.

  Nobody told me there was going to be food!

  Nobody but nobody told me there were going to be two hours of speeches as well. I thought Turnfest was about push-ups. Does push-up in Germany mean speech?

  A professor of sports is speaking. A sports professor? What are my Germans going to invent next, doctor of soccer?

  I am so amazed that I just keep eating. I gain between five and seven kilos. Is there a weight professor around?

  Before I become an elephant, I find me a man who can explain to me where I am. Dr. Reinhard Ganten it is. He’s a former lawyer for Germany’s ministry of justice, and now he’s the president of the Akademischer Turnerbund.

  Responding to my emergency call, the doctor will be glad to explain to me the idea of the Turnverein and the whole Turnen thing. “Sport is competition,” he says. “But Turnen is a controlled movements of your body.”

  He’s seventy years old and “my mind works perfectly, because, I think this is because I have always done sports, from the age of three or four.”

  Is this something uniquely German? I ask him, biting into a German salami.

  “Doing different sports, all at the same time, in order to get control of your body, and to know which muscles to use, I think this is German.”

  For days and nights I have been denying myself sleep as I have been poring over the question, What is German? And this man has known the answer exactly, for seventy years and counting!

  He knows more stuff:

  “The Turnfest, the original one a hundred fifty years ago, helped create this nation. The duke of Coburg allowed people from different areas to come to his dukedom for the Turnfest, something other kings and dukes at the time did not permit in their areas of control. This created a sense of unity among the people, the people who would later make up Germany. In fact, the founder of the Turn movement, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, established it so that people would be fit to fight foreign occupiers and serve as protectors of the homeland. Today there are about twenty thousand clubs of the DTB (Deutscher Turner-Bund), and there are five million members.”

  Praised be Jahn. Yes, I know, he’s the guy who once wrote that the Jews, among others, are “Germany’s misfortune.” But I’m not going to raise the issue. I want this day to be a day free of Jews, Nazis, or any other sensitive creatures.

  I talk to a few more people, men in suits and ladies in evening dresses, and they confirm to me that this Turnen makes for the soul of this country, the very essence of Germany. The DTB logo, the Turnerkreuz, they explain to me, “has four Fs, which stand for Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei ist die deutsche Turnerei.” Can they say it in English? I ask them. They can, only they give me different translations of it. I let it go.

  But don’t spend too much time on this, for here comes the real thing: “It’s not just sports or exercises,” one of them explains to me elegantly, “it’s a Verein. When I meet people I use the form Sie [“you,” the more respectful form], when I meet members of the club, even for the first time, I use du [“you” as it’s used among friends]. It’s like a family. And that’s uniquely German.”

  Get it? Here we are introduced to a new concept: Verein. What is it? Asked to explain this word, everyone here would agree that Verein is German, very German. What is Verein? Each person gives me a different translation: Club. Union. Association. Group. In short: Hard to translate. Something German. Verein.

  Like a good and learned scientist, I rush to meet the sports professor, in order to have an intellectual conversation between a push-up analyst and a salami-sandwich expert. Her name is Prof. Dr. Gudrun Doll-Tepper.

  Tell me, Doctor, where did you get your degree?

  “Freie Universität, Berlin.”

  Could you help me? I have a big problem here. Could you please describe Turnen for me?

  Yes, she can.

  “Turnen is practicing physical activity with particular equipment. Like an iron bar.”

  Sounds to me like the average American gym. Is it?

  “Gyms as we see know them today use equipment developed in Germany two hundred years ago!”

  Got to have a PhD to know this stuff.

  In the big hall of Castle Ehrenburg, somebody has just put up a huge sign:

  Wir sehen uns vom 18. bis 25. Mai 2013.

  [See you May 18–25, 2013.]

  That’s planning, baby! I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow, but these people already know where they’ll be two years from now!

  But no time to marvel at this phenomenon. There’s a sports show at 19:00. Local teens, adults, and children are to show off their gymnastic skills. About one thousand people are expected to show up for the event, as I’m told.

  I join the crowd. What a happy bunch! Everybody seems to know everybody here.

  The stage is ready. The gym players come with the one tool they have: their bodies. They do push-ups, they do fitness exercises, they work out, and the audience roars in applause.

  As Charles Schumann said to me: People watching people. I wonder if ravens also like to watch other ravens.

  •••

  Chapter 13

  The Germans Love their Soccer Team and the Mercedes Boss Loves his Mama

  A German I met in New York the other day has invited me to visit him in Tübingen when I’m in Germany. I am now in Germany and it’s three hours from here to Tübingen on the regional train. Should I go or not? Well, I have nothing better to do today. So, let’s go!

  I love the regional trains. Especially the one I’ve just boarded. It’s the old style, the one on which you can pull down the windows and let the fresh air of summer greet your face. Love it. Love it. Love it.

  Happy like a child, I sit down and lower the window. Can’t wait for the ride to start. There aren’t many people in this car, about five altogether, and I can stretch. Fat people like to stretch.

  The train is moving! The air is rushing in! I’m in heaven!

  And then, immediately, there is a German Invasion.

  First, a thirty-year old woman approaches. She asks me, in German-accented English, to please pull up the window. “There is too much draft!” she says. How did she know I speak English? She must have been trained in the German secret service. She’s so tough, so demanding, that I think it’s not really worth it to start World War III just for this. I offer a compromise: half opened, half closed. She says nothing and so I assume she agrees, and I close it halfway. One and one-half minutes later another German lady approaches. This one looks to be in her early twenties, fit and healthy, beautiful and athletic. She wants me to close the window because, she says, “it’s
too cold.” Where was she born, in the Sahara Desert? Today is one of the hottest days of the year. What’s happening with her? She demands that I comply with her order.

  I try the 50 percent formula again. She leaves, saying nothing. I pull up the window. Now I have it open only one quarter of the way. You would think everybody would be happy by now. No!

  An older man, seems to be in his mid-sixties, approaches me. “Why are you doing this?!” he raises his voice at me.

  Lebensraum, I tell him.

  It is a peaceful ride from here on.

  World War III, when it starts, will start in Germany on a regional train. On a nice summer day, on a train from Nürnberg to Tübingen. All because of a window.

  Somewhere between Nürnberg and Stuttgart, groups of people board. A group here, a group there. Young drinkers, for the most part. I watch them closely, diligently planning my war strategy in case they attack me for my one-quarter open window. They don’t act as individuals, these people. There’s something strange about them, though I can’t really tell what. It feels to me that it’s not a collection of individuals here; it’s more like a unit that has its own energy and rules, like a herd of sheep or a flock of birds. Here’s a group of men going to a concert, all of them wearing black T-shirts, and here’s another group of people, young men all as well, who discuss “tits” for over an hour and continuously drink beer.

  A thought comes to me: These people, the Germans, my Germans, are group people. Extreme group people. Strangely, the young drinking creatures on this train hand me a key to a world I have been trying to understand for quite some time: The world of the German. Yes, how could I be so stupid: This is the Verein thing! They are “group” people, the Germans. They are clinging to each other, thinking with each other, and are each other. Whatever this means.

  Yes!

  Be they students in Munich, worshippers in churches, intellectuals in various disciplines, artists in various media, residents of the same villages: This is a Verein Country.