I Sleep in Hitler's Room Read online

Now I got the answer. If we, Jews, mourn two thousand five hundred years, let the Germans mourn at least as much. And to make sure I got it totally right, the Rabbi adds:

  “The Holocaust will be remembered,” by the Germans, for “at least as long. Hundreds of years, thousands of years—it will remain. I do hope that this foreseeable future fact will lead the Germans to be extremely cautious in order to prevent any hint of repeating” such crimes.

  It is another custom of the Jews, in case you are not aware of it, to apply historical events to the present, and to mix past worries with current ones. So, I ask my Rabbi to explain to me the demos in Hamburg, the violence I saw on the streets.

  The Rabbi, as is dictated by rabbinical tradition, starts by proclaiming humility. He says:

  “It’s not my subject to talk about, because I haven’t been there, I don’t know.” And now that we got the Humility part down pat, the Rabbi—as is always the tradition—goes on to actually answer and Spread the Knowledge. He says: “But I’ve read in the newspapers that through the Internet they have organized people from all over the place to come to Hamburg just in order to have fun in using force. Quite a few of them are not Germans. Quite a few of them are of Turkish background. Some of them are what in former generations they have called anarchists. But not ideological anarchists. Just young people who would not accept any kind of authority. You see this in the outskirts of Paris, in some quarters in London. I don’t think it’s a specific German phenomenon. It has something to do with the electronic media. If you didn’t have television, if you didn’t have the Internet, it would have been much more difficult to organize such things.”

  My fellow Jew and myself, and perhaps you’ve figured it out on your own already, keep on smoking while talking. I am not really sure about the law in this country, if this behavior is legal or not, but one thing must be made clear right now: Nobody in Hamburg is going to stop two Smoking Jews. Forget it. If anybody is trying, they’ll immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. No German needs this on his or her résumé.

  And so, between smokes, I ask him:

  Are you proud to be German?

  “I have never expressed any pride about my culture.”

  Never?

  “No.”

  Would he like to have been part of another culture?

  “Also no.”

  And then, between one cigarette and another, as he prepares to bring the new cigarette to his lips while holding to soon-to-be-lit lighter, the Chain-Smoking Rabbi brags a bit about his younger years:

  “I was tempted to emigrate to the US after the war. My uncle offered me a job in his factory, he offered me an empty house that belonged to him. It was real temptation,” laments the Elder Smoking Jew. Alas, he did not accept the offer.

  Why?

  “Because I was a German.”

  This German rabbi is funny, I must say.

  This calls for another cigarette.

  When a Jew changes into a new cigarette, it is very important to remember, he must change the topic of the conversation as well.

  Any comment about Angela Merkel? I ask my Smoking Partner.

  Partner or not, Rabbi Schmidt refuses to comment, saying he has been out of politics for thirty years. But later on, when I ask how it feels to be an icon in today’s Germany, he dismisses it by saying that the real reason for his being made into an icon “has to do with the fact that the government today is not so impressive as it used to be.”

  That’s Rabbinical!

  Helmut is a rare combination of scholar and politician, though I am not clear which part influences which part and which is his stronger side. Hard to say. Per our agreement, he is going to read these pages, having the right to strike words off it. This will offer me a better and deeper understanding of the man. Will he go back on anything he said? But whatever he chooses to do, one thing seems clear to me: He is a man who lives history and loves it. He impresses me as someone intimately familiar with history’s often contradictory turns, extracting pleasure from minute details that others would prefer to ignore. He sits in a wheelchair, the years obviously taking their toll on him, but his mind seems to be sharp and ever alert. He enjoys his job at Die Zeit and speaks fondly of it. He says to me, of his paper, that “we’re totally independent. Nobody tells us what we ought to print and what not.” He takes pride in that.

  As I am about to leave this Elder Jew, he comes back to the Arab–Israeli conflict. He tells me that his admiration goes to former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat but not to former Israeli president Menachem Begin.

  He explains:

  “If Moshe Dayan [Israel’s Defense Minister at the time] was the one signing the peace treaty with Anwar Sadat, there would have been lasting peace in the Middle East today. The ones who killed both Rabin and Sadat knew what they were doing.” Helmut, the historian that he is, ends the interview with a rather interesting prediction: “The war in the Middle East today can turn into a war between Western civilization and the Islamic world. And in the end Israel will be only a minor player, if at all.”

  Somehow I feel, don’t ask me why, that during his younger years this man did not go to the streets and threw empty bottles at people just for the fun of it.

  As I leave the Second Jew behind me, I feel calmer. It feels to me that I start gaining my sanity. I’m not going to Iceland. Not yet. There is some logic to it all. There’s a system here in Germany. Not everybody is stupid. It has to do with history, not just beer.

  Maybe, just maybe, the reason everybody is drinking so much beer is that they want to forget the Holocaust. It’s possible. Everything is possible. Maybe that’s why I smoke cigarettes, because I want to forget Auschwitz.

  You never know.

  But I am a little bothered. What the Smoking Jew told me, that “quite a few of them are of Turkish background,” I know for a fact to be totally wrong. Unlike him, I took part in the demos—and I didn’t see one Turkish man or woman in the crowds.

  Well, he claimed to have read this piece of info in the media.

  And since I have time aplenty, I decide to check up on it.

  How do you check out The Media? A good idea would be to pay a visit.

  Question: Visit whom?

  I heard, don’t tell anybody I told you, that here in the North there’s a smart media man, half Italian, half German, who answers to the name of Giovanni di Lorenzo. He is the editor in chief of Die Zeit.

  I go to see him.

  Since the age of eleven, he tells me, he has lived in Germany.

  “In Italy I am the German, in Germany I am the Italian.”

  Unlike Rabbi Schmidt, this man is no Jew.

  And so what are you, I ask him, a German or Italian?

  “I can’t answer this.”

  Obviously no Jew. Can’t answer the question. Or ask another question in reply. He is half and half.

  What’s it like to be half and half? Well, let’s hear him talk:

  “My relationship to Italians is passionate. My relationship to Germans is more like a marriage relationship. Too much passion in a marriage can be deadly.”

  This is a high philosophical argument and a deep psychological observation. I need time to ponder it.

  I decide to engage in small talk and so I ask him:

  What is the German character?

  I hope that he will wander about for half an hour about this and that, giving me ample time to ponder his previous statement. But, oh no! This half-and-half Chief goes on into ever higher, ever deeper fields of thoughts, and I am totally lost.

  First he starts with his German half, saying the usual stuff that we are all the same, all equal, same color and same height. Then, after completely satisfying the German in him, he gets into his better half, the Italian.

  Being German, he says, is a fear that every item of clothing you give to the laundry will come back damaged.

  I love this! I start liking the man!

  Let me tell you, and t
his is between us—I will deny it if you ever quote me: This is so me! This is one of my most intimate fears: The Laundry. No wonder that people, when they get really upset with me, call me “German!”

  There’s a German lurking in me. How did he get there? Maybe I was switched at birth in the hospital. You can laugh, but things like that happen.

  Imagine if my Jewish friends find out that I’m actually German. That’s all I need.

  No. I’ll remain in the closet. I will never come out, I swear.

  I am so shocked, I ask the Chief to elaborate.

  He does. Thank God that the editor in chief of Die Zeit has nothing better to do with his time than to explain to this closeted German the root cause of his most intimate fear.

  It’s a pathological fear of patina, of Schmutz, he says. That’s “German.”

  He’s talking about me, and he has no clue!

  Oh God: It just dawns on me: Am I really German? This is all I need now. After living a life of a Jew, it so abruptly and violently turns out that I am a German!

  Couldn’t I be somebody else? I would kill to be an Italian. Irish. Even Albanian. But German? After being Jewish!

  This is Hell. But I have nobody to blame. When you visit Half Italian / Half German, what good can you expect to come out of it? Only a fool like me, a man blind to the future, puts himself in such dangerous waters.

  And this Mr. Half and Half, who, I am sure, clearly sees to my inner misery, suddenly finds much pleasure in belaboring this dumb issue.

  “Years ago,” says Mr. Half and Half, “a German minister had to resign because he wrote a letter of recommendation for his brother-in-law. As a half Italian I say this to you: An Italian minister would have resigned if he didn’t do it. In Germany you have to resign because you did it.”

  Yes, stick it to me, Mister! What do you think, that I don’t want to be an Italian, a full-blooded Italian? I’d kill to be Berlusconi. Why do you torture me?

  I say this line in my heart but don’t utter it with my lips. Never! Instead, like any average neurotic Jew you ever met, I say:

  How could such a country, so enlightened, have descended that low in World War II?

  I wonder if there ever was a man, or a woman, who raised such a stupid question in this venerable office of Die Zeit since the day it was built. When the day comes and I become the chief editor of Die Zeit, I guarantee you this: I’ll throw out anyone who asks me questions like this. Lucky me, Half and Half is still the chief.

  “I spoke with Helmut Schmidt the other day and we discussed it. He told me that he doesn’t trust the Germans. And he’s a former chancellor.”

  I have no idea how this answers my question, but the mere mention of this other Jew, Rabbi Helmut, makes me feel good and totally calms my nerves.

  And now that I am relaxed, abruptly feeling Jewish again, I go on to ask Giovanni about the anarchists. Jews like to talk about all kinds of extremes. For one reason or another, this issue pleases them since the day they strolled out of Egypt.

  “The anarchists became more and more similar to the people they fight,” he says. “This is a constant that exists in all radical political movements. I don’t believe in a genetic disposition of one people as opposed to others.”

  I am not sure I agree with him, but I’m equally not sure that I don’t agree with him. Simply stated, and I’m quite sad about this, I am no gene scientist. True, I should have been a doctor, or at least a biologist, but I’m not. The only thing I know about genes is how to spell them: g.e.n.e.s. That’s it. But I don’t think it’s proper that I profess my gene ignorance at this point in time. So I switch the topic. I tell Half and Half how well I was welcomed by the neo-Nazis. Don’t ask me how this particular part of my new past suddenly jumps into my mind. I’m no psychiatrist either.

  Half and Half seems surprised. His reaction comes in one word:

  “Really?”

  And then, since I am talking to Mr. Half and Half, I switch from the radical right to the radical left. Why not? I tell him of my observation that the radical left is dirty, as opposed to the Mr. Clean radical right. His response is: “Yes, it’s true. But from the point of view of a leftist, which I am not, I’d like to say: Nobody is perfect.”

  Giovanni, if you really want to know, strikes me as a German in an Italian suit. In other words: German soul in an Italian body. He is charismatic, fully in control, and he rules over this journalistic empire with a smile. In clichéd, stereotypical terms: His command is Germanic, the delivery Italian. The man has a style. But there is another level to him, deeper yet, that you get to see only if he feels comfortable with you and lets you swim in the very inside of his being. He is the perfect host: Friendly, loving, funny, and a great storyteller. He has to get loose, but once he does he shines.

  “If you want to know the difference between Germany and Italy it is this: My two-year-old daughter, when she wants to say Yes, she speaks in Italian, she says Si, always, even to Germans. But when she wants to say No, she says Nein, and only Nein, not No, even to Italians!”

  How do you explain this?

  Herr Giovanni bursts into laughter: “The sound of the language!”

  There is a cliché, which you probably heard, that the favorite word in German is verboten. Is that correct? He says No. It’s just that it fits the stereotype.

  He normally reads papers such as the New York Times / International Herald Tribune, and “they say that Germany wants to separate itself from Europe and join with the Russians, to restore Apollo, and this is bullshit. They live outside of Germany, and they are in love with their stereotypes.”

  Speaking of the Times and the Tribune brings Giovanni into the realm of his favorite subject: Media.

  “Die Zeit is the biggest newspaper after the Bild Zeitung!”

  What makes Die Zeit?

  “First of all, the Tradition; we have a really big tradition here. Unser Heiligen [our saints]. I’ve been here for five and a half years. We’re trying to renew the paper, without betraying two things. One, we don’t want to indoctrinate, we don’t tell people what to think, only give them the possibilities by which they could form their own opinion. It’s not the ideological approach. Second: we always refuse to be part of the zeitgeist, to follow the fad of the moment. It’s a nice joke on words, no? Zeitgeist.”

  Church bells are heard from outside. A great opportunity for Giovanni to come up with a little story: “A couple of weeks ago a Jewish friend of mine was here, from Tel Aviv, and when he heard the church bells he said: ‘Oh, the priest saw that a Jew is sitting here. “Sabotage!” ’ ”

  He goes to close the window, hysterically laughing as he moves in the room. Coming back, he says:

  “When I started here I said: I respect the tradition of the house, but I’ll break one tradition. The slogan at the time was: ‘We make the newspaper that we like.’ This would be our ruin, I said. Shit doesn’t taste good just because millions of flies like it. I believe, I said, that we have to make a newspaper while keeping in mind what our readers want to read. We cannot do just what our little brains want. In five years we grew 60 percent.”

  Which is your strongest department and which is the weakest?

  “Politics and arts are the strongest sections,” he says, later adding: Economics, too.

  But he conveniently forgets to say what’s the weakest section.

  As the old Jewish saying goes, “Only the fools tell everything.”

  Giovanni di Lorenzo is aware that I have a long journey ahead of me, and he wants to help. He shares with me what he deeply feels about Germany:

  Here, the people think they live in a country that doesn’t work very well. But of all the countries that I saw, that I visited, I can say: This country is exemplary. This country was built on the ruin of the most terrible state in the history of humanity. Let us work together that this marvelous work done here endures. My grandfather was in a concentration camp, and when my grandmother talked about it she
lowered her voice because she was afraid that her neighbors, former Nazis, would hear her. Thank God that Germany is over, those people dead. I know this country. I am married to Germany. There exist passions that are higher, but for a marriage it’s ideal.

  I bid Half and Half goodbye and then I remember: I forgot to ask him about the Turks. Foolish me. I write a note to myself: Visit the Turks before you are done with journey.

  •••

  Chapter 6

  Money: Where German Engineering Meets Disney

  Evelyn and Mathias, two of the nicest people I met in Hamburg, tell me that on the day of morrow they go to Autostadt. Doesn’t sound very Turkish to me, but I like the sound of the name. Autostadt. I decide to join. Do you know Autostadt? It’s in a place called Wolfsburg, and it’s where Volkswagen showcases its cars.

  My first stop at Autostadt is at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I get out of the car, light up a cigarette, and three employees jump to tell me that this is a no-smoking zone. They are nice. One of them comes with an ashtray, so that I won’t lose my cigarette. But no more cigarettes, please, he tells me.

  Enter hotel.

  There’s more than one door as you walk in, each one opened by another smiling employee. All employees smile here. My cynic self tells me that, for every smile I get from these young and handsome employees, somewhere along the way my wallet will get lighter. But I push away this horrible, negative thought. I choose to be positive and believe that these young and beautiful people really love me and that they smile at me only because I am really so very wonderful. I feel good. The staff of Ritz-Carlton is—how should I put it?—different. Each of them carries a little booklet called Service Values that contains the Twelve Commandments of Ritz-Carlton. It starts with “1. I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life” and ends with “12. I am responsible for uncompromising levels of cleanliness and creating a safe and accident-free environment.”

  No. Not one of them smile at me because of some booklet. They smile at me because I am a natural Smile Maker. You just see me, look at me, and you love me.