Dead Jews are still more attractive

My father was a really bad driver but, like all bad drivers, he believed he could drive better than everyone else. He was extremely reluctant to be stopped, and he was able to put the grotesquely overpowered SUVs from the affluent suburbs in their place on the Wasserburger Landstrasse in Munich with his metallic green Seat Cordoba: He narrowed his eyes, glanced up spotted the driver in the left lane and pressed the gas pedal even as the traffic light anxiously switched from red to amber.

As soon as he caught sight of the clumsy BMW bodies in the rear-view mirror, he relaxed and shifted from first to fourth gear, and then, while I slowly freed my cramped fingers from my knees again, he gave me a little lecture about how ridiculous the German one was mania for expensive cars. And I wondered if the cars weren’t more than just status symbols, maybe they really were a kind of shelter for those who had nothing to fear except road accidents and house fires, inflation and the gradually increasing retirement age.

I didn’t tell him about these thoughts, why should he, he knew everything himself. My father hadn’t had any protection at all since he had somehow survived National Socialism as a little boy in Brasov. Did you know that some people get a little disappointed when they learn that there are Holocaust survivors who weren’t in any camps at all?

There is a line between people who perceive their surroundings as hostile, even the cars around them, and those who don’t even know what enemies are. The first live in a completely different world than the second. So there are those who are forced to perceive the world as hostile, and there are those who find the world more harmless, or at least more permanent, and who are not forced to deal every day with the fact that they live in a post-fascist society. The Jews belong to the first group, but so do almost all the other excluded.

Moved to tears

One of my plays, a radio play, was recently discussed in public. I’d rather not say by whom, or I might get an injunction. Five German women sat on the podium. Every time they said Jews, it sounded like they were saying “Jews” in quotation marks. You can listen to the discussion, but there’s no video, just a still, so it’s possible the women are saying Jews while drawing quotation marks in the air. Why can nobody in Germany speak the word Jew pronounce?

One of the judges complained that anti-Semitic slogans could be heard in my play. She finds it unpedagogical and somehow not okay, after all it could do something to her students, and besides there are the AfD and the Monday demonstrations. Another woman, who has obviously read the relevant Wikipedia article on the subject, thinks that there is not enough theory in the radio play: Yes, please explain to us in 53 minutes how anti-Semitism comes about! But please with a constant trigger warning, not that the Germans will be re-traumatized by the violence in which their ancestors participated.

I am thinking of Art Spiegelman, who in 1987, after the publication of the first part of «Maus», was asked at the Frankfurt Book Fair by a German journalist whether his comic book about the Holocaust was not in bad taste. Spiegelman smiled and replied that he found the Holocaust distasteful.

I’ll keep listening to the discussion. Another piece will be discussed. I listened to it because the description sounds so grotesque: a man is deported to Auschwitz with his daughter from the Lodz ghetto, and the two have an hour-long dialogue about the daughter’s doll, which was previously bitten by a German shepherd dog. Klezmer music played in between.

The piece has really moved her to tears, admits one of the jurors. Aha, I think dead or sad Jews still pull. Jews who don’t just want to write about dead, sad Jews, less so. Take a cattle car, a child and an East German klezmer trio and everyone is clapping enthusiastically. As the jury tears dry, I get angry.

I get angry because I always have to explain everything. I get angry because a jury is speaking publicly about my work and I’m not allowed to say anything about it. I get angry because in this country I’m only taken seriously when I write about what everyone already knows. I decide to write to the jury. I write that I am not a teacher, but an artist, that the jury is free not to take me seriously as an artist and only examine my work for educational content, but that I am also free to complain about it.

I am not the governess of the Germans

I write that it is ridiculous to assume that a radio play could incite the few retired German teachers who still listened to the radio. I write that I don’t want to be associated with the AfD and that I’m fed up with serving up easily digestible bits and pieces of cheap anti-Semitism criticism that doesn’t hurt anyone on an authentic Seder plate, that I don’t want to explain anything anymore and anti-Semitism the problem of the Germans is.

I never want to explain what we do on Hanukkah again, and I never want to say anything about Israel again. I think back to my student years, when I showed visitors to the Jewish Museum in Munich the Torah pointer and the Kiddush cup for ten euros an hour, just so they had an excuse to ask me wide-eyed if I was also a “Jew”. be, of course in quotation marks.

I no longer want to be relegated to my place by a German jury, a German dramaturge or a German reader: that of the educator. I no longer want to be the governess who alternately admonishes and then praises the Germans for their exemplary processing, for their unique culture of remembrance, for the many beautiful memorials and museums. I send my mail.

The jury replies a few hours later: Thank you for your detailed feedback!

I write another answer, write that there are no misunderstandings, only contradictions, contradictions between me and the jury, and when I press “send”, I know that somewhere out there, probably in Berlin and Cologne, there are five There are women who think I’m crazy, even though I’m just my father’s daughter.

Incidentally, my father got into real trouble with his family when he decided to go to Germany in around 1979, because of a wife and a job. His mother cried for days. “Dana, don’t be so stupid,” he told me sometime around 2005, “I knew the Germans wouldn’t be so stupid and kill the same people twice, why would they do that? We’re safe here, Dana.”

Dana from Suffrin, born in 1985, is a writer and lives in Munich.