by Avraham Burg
And here, suddenly, a man who is so honest and direct steps into my life. “Yes, I was a Nazi,” he writes me. Between the lines, I think that he wants to meet me, no less than I want to meet him. I so much wanted to meet him, both to touch this experience with my own hands, but also to meet through him parts of myself. I wanted to feel what I really feel facing a genuine Nazi. It was not the Eichmann of my childhood, separated from reality by a glass cage in the courtroom. It was a man of flesh and blood, a small cog in a terrible murderous machine. One of those who made that giant and effective apparatus possible and so awful. Curiosity drew me to him, and I confess that I also had a very deep and existential fear, maybe a victim’s fear of the victimizer, maybe a congenital Jewish trait.
Out of my emotional curiosity more complex thoughts emerged. The profound change he had undergone, with his simple honesty—linked to memories and pains as well as to hopes and responsibility—aroused my intense curiosity. Am I able, I asked myself, to understand Helmut’s story as a key to healing the world? I hoped to find an answer to my wondering. If an individual such as Helmut could change and free himself of the brainwashing that drowned an entire German generation, and was able to turn the rigid legacy of militarism and nationalism of his parents into the inclusive universalism of his children—are societies and cultures able to do it? It’s so “Jewish.” The concept of repentance—regret of the bad past and accepting responsibility for a better future—is the deep inner foundation of Jewish renewal. If he can, so can others. Even I can change and improve. From my inner place I saw an elderly anonymous individual, a member of the previous generation, which I perceived to be ossified, with a key to the lock of part of my future. We set a meeting for late August 2010, and I made a special trip to Berlin. I from Israel, he from Munich, and Berlin, a neutral city between us. He came with his daughter Irina. We sat for hours and talked. In English, German, Hebrew, and anything in between. I recorded the whole conversation with him, and I listen to it often during long trips in Israel and abroad.
When he entered the room, I felt a certain disappointment. So short and fragile. I had expected that a tall, handsome Aryan, like a mythological god, would enter the room, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, who had just emerged from the Black Forest, as in the epic German Nibelung poem. I imagined him tall, strapping, meticulously dressed. Maybe not in uniform, but almost. Instead, a kind grandfather stood before me. Fragile. A great tenderness on his face. His fragility invites you to offer him support. And when we shook hands, a thought went through my head: “His touch, his skin, is not cold and frozen. Not like a poisonous snake. He feels completely human.” And indeed, he was. I touched the Nazi, and nothing bad happened to me. Or more precisely, I touched the former Nazi, and a lot happened to me, for the better.
We went down for lunch. We each ordered, and when the platters arrived, he moved his hand slowly under his jacket, took out the spoon, wiped it gently and hesitantly with the tablecloth and began slowly eating his soup. I choked up, and was transformed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
SOME YEARS AGO, AROUND 2003, AT THE HEIGHT OF THE bloody days of the intifada, someone took the trouble to cover many bus stops in Jerusalem with graffiti that said, “God of Vengeance.” In the dead of night my youngest son, Noam, and a friend went out with spray paint and covered those graffiti with a different one: “Lord of Peace.” Indeed, the Jewish God has many names and epithets, a name for all seasons, an epithet for every existential situation. But only some of them migrated to Israel with the rise of Zionism. Most of the soft names, with overtones of compassion and mercy, were left behind in the diaspora, embarrassed, as if left unwanted.
Meanwhile, the contemporary Jewish commonwealth, which is our third Jewish sovereignty, the tough God, and many of his violent disciples, set the tone of identity and spirituality. The gentle, complex Jews and their Judaism went elsewhere. It took me many years to understand the structural problem of the Zionist revival. A callous toughness that rejects the soft components of historic Judaism. I was one of the young children of this Judaism, and later one of its political leaders. I gave so many speeches about the Holocaust and revival in my day that I knew by heart every bend in the course of this river of our history and rhetoric. A river full of Jewish blood, flanked by bloodthirsty wicked gentiles on its banks, constantly cheering the sight of our flow into the ocean of death. Although my conscious mind lived within the classic narrative of Passover—“Not just one enemy has stood against us to wipe us out. In every generation, there have been those who have stood against us to wipe us out”—my subconscious was already looking for another channel of history.
In my search for other directions I went back to Gershom Scholem’s book, Devarim be-Go. There is a letter there to Hannah Arendt. On very frequent occasions in the past I had read Scholem’s position regarding the Holocaust, delved into it and thought about it. From his letter to Arendt I tried every time anew to glean more ideas. I didn’t know Hannah Arendt well enough, but I understood Scholem precisely. In the thick of my search someone drew my attention to the fact that Scholem—who was known for his personality, not the most pleasant, not the most deferential or ready to acknowledge another ego aside from his own—had erased Arendt’s reply and left only his position for the annals of history. Such an act of intellectual violence immediately piqued my curiosity. What was so terrible about what she wrote that compelled this great historian to erase her from his book? I found her letter, and I also found, to my surprise, that very few of the writings of this important philosopher had been translated to Hebrew. It took the academic establishment decades to overcome Zionist doctrine in order to open some gates into the worlds of this original and courageous woman, her experiences and thoughts. With the letter I also discovered Arendt, and following her I also reached large parts of my hidden self.
With almost brazen courage she writes to Scholem, her faithless childhood friend:
To come to the point: let me begin, going on from what I have just stated, with what you call “love of the Jewish people” or Ahabath Israel. (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism, when it was first used in Hebrew language and literature, etc.) You are quite right—I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person.*
Then she tells Scholem about a conversation she had with a senior political figure in Israel, apparently Golda Meir, whose name was omitted and gender changed at “his” request for purposes of publication of the exchange of letters. Many said about Golda Meir at the time that she was “the only man in the government.” No wonder that Arendt agreed to alter her identity. But beyond the cruel and disparaging humor, had I believed in God’s direction of my personal life and intervention in current events, I would have considered my encounter with this text a divine sign.
I ENCOUNTERED THE LETTER IN 2006, WHEN I WAS IN THE midst of a journey into the depths, in the footsteps of my late father, with Noam, my youngest child, the only one of my children who listened to me and did not travel with all his friends to the “March of the Living” at Auschwitz (an annual educational program that brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust). On Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah), thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex built during World War II.
I read Arendt’s letter to Scholem on the morning of our Sabbath day in Berlin. I marked the place in the book, put it into a pack, and we went
to pray at the new synagogue, the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin. It is a beautiful and elegant building that I knew about from all the stories told by Dad, who walked the streets of this neighborhood before the destruction, just as he did during his repeated visits to the city in the last years of his life. We walked there with a written guide prepared for us by Hillel, my nephew, who is a son to me and a friend, as well as an editor of my books and a fellow traveler in life. Long before me, he sensed that his identity would not be complete without going through the Berlin station. And now we were following him.
It is an ornate synagogue, freighted with symbols and meaning. It’s hard to understand the history of the Jews of Berlin without it. The peacock-like golden dome and other costs of construction were all paid for by the distinguished Jewish community of Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century. The building was a proud, aggressive declaration that said: “We can do it ourselves, openly.” Within its confines the ancient rites were renewed, and adjustments were made between the lives of the Jews and the lives of Germans in general. Everything proceeded as usual until Kristallnacht of 1938. A Nazi mob gathered near this symbolic synagogue and tried to set it alight. A decent and brave police officer by the name of Otto Bellgardt arrived and confronted the inflamed Nazi mob alone. He ordered them to disperse, and stayed to protect the historical site. The synagogue was looted, but saved because of the bravery of that officer. What was saved from the Nazis was destroyed in an allied bombing by British air force planes. Over the years, the building was restored and returned to the Jewish community for religious and communal use. “Let’s go there,” I suggested to Noam. “Let’s see a synagogue saved from the Nazis, and I’ll show you the perimeter markers of the synagogue that existed until the British bombs destroyed it.”
The prayer was sad and sparse. We didn’t feel the heritage, the depth of the years, the weight of history. Just a coincidental collection of visitors like us who had gathered for a Sabbath prayer and were disappointed. At least the service was egalitarian, and didn’t discriminate between women and men. During the prayer, I continued reading the exchange between those two professors, who once were friends and became so hostile toward one another. When the service was over, I asked one of the women there, one who seemed knowledgeable and connected and not a casual visitor like us, whether she would be ready to take us to the courtyard to see the boundary markers of the synagogue. “Certainly,” she replied with a welcoming expression. We went up and down staircases, passed through narrow corridors between the different wings of the structure, and in the many minutes we spent between the current place of prayer and its destroyed predecessor we chatted a bit.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Avrum, and this is my son, Noam, and we are here on a kind of roots trip.”
“Whose roots?”
“The roots of my father, and you?”
“My name is Hannah Arendt,” she replied, and aware of the small drama attached to her name, she added after a pregnant pause, “not that one.”
That day I found Hannah Arendt twice, and I didn’t need any more. That is how the one-sided affair began between her, whom I never knew, and me, whom she will never know. In the end, I dedicated my book The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes to that impressive woman who has influenced my life so much since. “To the late Hannah Arendt, who knew and understood before everyone, who dared and expressed it better than anyone.” I sensed then, without thoroughly figuring it out for myself, that Hannah Arendt picked up for me where Yeshayahu Leibowitz left off. I wasn’t completely done with him; I am committed without reservation to his positions on the occupation and separation of religion and state. But over the years I have sensed a certain deception when confronting his rigid Orthodoxy. I don’t want to be open like him to all corners of the world but closed airlessly when it comes to my Judaism and its normative system. I’m not Orthodox in any sphere. When it comes to the human sphere, I don’t believe in one exclusive position. So precisely in religion, tradition, and faith, which are the most transcendent human creations (yes, yes, human and not divine), I won’t allow other interpretive voices aside from the increasingly insular voice of Jewish law?
That is why Leibowitz’s ideas have played a progressively smaller role in my life. But because there is something very close between him and Arendt, it was easy for me to move from him to her, to understand her defiant position, just like his, and identify with her. They both chose to look for the Archimedean point outside the conventional comfort zone in order to raise the Jewish humanistic world to new heights. And they both simultaneously refused to disconnect from the warm bosom of their identity as Jews.
I’m not in love with the collective, any collective, even though I don’t argue with my being part of one. I feel very comfortable in the position that Arendt borrowed from Bernard Lazare: “the conscious pariah.” She, who was one of the latest and most important of an impressive line of German Jewish intellectuals, scientists, and artists from a variety of fields, believed in all her heart that the conscious pariahs are “those who really did most for the spiritual dignity of their people, who [are] great enough to transcend the bounds of nationality and to weave the strands of their Jewish genius into the general texture of European life… those bold spirits who tried to make of the emancipation of the Jews that which it really should have been—an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu.”†
In those days, I saw moment by moment how my ties were fraying and how I was becoming disconnected from everything that was familiar and comfortable to me: acceptance and public stature. In the days when I had no one except my family members as a rock of stability, I had Hannah Arendt. For many years, I had time to read her writings and try to understand some of her wisdom. I felt part of her mission, except that this time it was much more difficult. The German Jewish philosopher tried, through her doctrine and ideas, to propose the direct path to the integration of European Jews in the European fabric being renewed around them. Today my effort is on the one hand to integrate Jewish Israelis in the region that they despise and fear, and at the same time to spread our arms as wide as possible to prevent a final rift between Israeli Jews and the West. Unfortunately, Israel of the twenty-first century is no longer the front line of Westernism. Its value system has changed, the human fabric is different, and for too many of us the European West boils down to “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism,” while its American part is perceived as shallow, childish, seductive, and nothing else. Building this potential bridge between the point of departure to Israeli sovereignty from nineteenth-century Europe, and the goal of its arrival on the shores of the Mediterranean, is one of the most important challenges of our time.
When Lova Eliav, the prophet of peace of the previous generation, gave Golda Meir his defining book, Land of the Hart, Meir asked him, “Why did you write a book? Berl Katznelson has already written everything.” I felt that Hannah Arendt had already written everything I had to say and far better than I, and I felt relieved. I had someone to lean on. With the deepening of the one-sided acquaintance between us I realized that what attracted me to her thoughts were her two magnetic poles. On the one hand her love of thought, as if life was a great riddle that needs a creative solution, a maze with a logic to its mistakes and vicissitudes, with a way out of its traps. I also like thinking. I’m not capable of reaching her heights and depths, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t think my own way through life. Just like running: I was never a great athlete and will no longer become one, but that hasn’t prevented me from making running the main hobby of my life. The other pole of her magnet excites me anew every time—how she can simultaneously be inside and outside two worlds. Critiquing European culture, its successes and failures, based on the heritage and modernity of Jewish culture, and as a respected German philosopher, standing outside Judaism in order to improve the experience of Jews.
/> When I managed to listen to her frustrations, to genuinely feel the tears of the abandoned friend and dispel the heavy cloud of cigarette smoke that hid her pain like a thick scarf, I heard her whispering to him, to Gershom Scholem, and I thought that I also want those words. I want to shout them as an answer to all my adversaries and attackers:
What confuses you is that my arguments and my approach are different from what you are used to; in other words, the trouble is that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not belong to any organization and always speak only for myself, and on the other hand, that I have great confidence in Lessing’s selbstdenken [self-thought, thinking for oneself] for which, I think, no ideology, no public opinion, and no “convictions” can ever be a substitute. Whatever objections you may have to the results, you won’t understand them unless you realize that they are really my own and nobody else’s.‡
Well done, Hannah, that is precisely where I am with my thoughts, which are always “betwixt and between.” In the middle between so many places, but they are genuinely mine, and I’m not ready to replace them with any clichéd, hollow content. You may say that you are unconditionally inside, but actually you are “betwixt and between.” I also feel that way. Between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, between sanctity and liberty, between East and West, between Israel and Europe, between tradition and progress, between this place and the wider world, between loss and hope, and between Israeliness and Judaism.