I Sleep in Hitler's Room Read online

  The gardener, like the trees and the grass, keeps silent.

  But not Günter. He likes to talk. “Everybody knows that the Jews control the American economy. But I make a good living in Germany.”

  I, president and CEO of Goldman Sachs, ask him: How come the Jews are so rich?

  “Most of them are bankers. They were here like this in Germany, and they are like this in America. And whoever has the money has the power.”

  What makes the Jew so money smart?

  “I don’t know. It’s their character. I admire what they do in Israel. They have good business sense. It’s in them. They were always like this.”

  I order the liver meal. I eat. I don’t know why I do this. Just got into me. If people here sit in this place and enjoy themselves, let me enjoy it too. Just so. And then, I don’t know why, the picture of the Nazi officers and their meeting next door to me makes me want to meet them. To have a talk, them and me. Very strange, I know. Problem is, they are dead. I think a bit about this little dilemma and then remember the name Ulrich Matthes, the actor who played Goebbels in the film “Der Untergang” (Downfall). I go to meet him, in another restaurant, one that he likes.

  He says to me: “For ninety percent of the people I am the one who played Goebbels. But for me, I am much more of a theater actor, and my most important work is in theater. There must be some physical resemblance between me and Goebbels, but I don’t want to look like him. It’s difficult enough to play him.”

  People still ask you about that role?

  “Just yesterday I was asked. It’s six years ago!”

  Why do they still ask?

  “There is something erotic in it, to look through the keyhole, to see Hitler eat his noodles. There’s still a fascination with Nazi figures. Not only in Germany.”

  Are Germans just like everybody else, or is there something that identifies them, something unique that’s “German”?

  “As an actor, I’ll say that it’s the language.”

  That’s it?

  “When I read Rudolf Hess, who wrote that he killed Jews and then played Schubert and had tears rolling down his face . . . that’s German. In my depressive or melancholic moments I think that this quality of being romantic and cruel is a German characteristic.”

  This is scary. I’m leaving Berlin.

  •••

  Chapter 9

  Wedding with Angels: An American Prophet Comes to Visit

  I take the train to Hamburg. I heard that an “American prophet,” one Mr. Patrick Holloran, has come to town, and I am going to see him. The church, in a suburb of Hamburg, is packed with German believers, young and old. They raise their hands high, American Evangelical-style, they sing, they speak in tongues, and they give the impression of being pretty content. The Prophet enters. A somewhat tall man with a ponytail, shirt over pants, sporting a big belly. All that’s missing from this picture is a Harley-Davidson. He looks so much like one of those characters!

  Anyway, he has no Harley-Davidson. At least not here. What he does have is pictures. He shows everybody pix of his family, kids and stuff. God, he says to whoever has ears, uses his daughter-in-law to bring people to Jesus Christ.

  And now he presents a picture of his wife.

  An angel came the other day, he says, and “took four tumors out of her.” The German audience applauds. They trust this American prophet. No questions asked. I look at a man sitting next to me; he wears a getitonline.eu t-shirt.

  The Prophet keeps showing more pix of his family. We have to know everybody. Too bad we can’t see the angels in the pix, but they are there. Here’s his daughter, and the angels usually appear to her, he says. No pix of them. His wife again. The Prophet’s wife, the Prophet tells his German listeners, is a Messianic Jew. Important fact, I guess. The Germans look on intently at this American family. They love the Prophet’s family. He tells them about his daughter’s wedding, where, you guessed it, the angels showed up and participated in the dancing. Not only that, but seventy-two people accepted Christ on the spot. Applause. Amazing how the people here believe everything he says. The parents or grandparents of these people believed a short Austrian; they believe a tall American.

  End of pix show. Time for the sermon.

  “Money is good,” he says, and adds, “New BMW is better than a 1972 Beetle.”

  “Jesus is my banker,” he reveals. Would be great to know which stocks Jesus recommends. Maybe I should ask the Prophet in private.

  I have no clue what this prophet, dressed with the worst of taste, really wants from my life. He speaks in English and is translated by a German pastor named Gaby. Gaby, a blond pastor, is doing well for herself. The area here, a cluster of buildings, belongs to her family. I met her a while ago, when I came to this country for a show that I had here. She told me then that the owner of Aldi, a German supermarket chain, is Jewish. How do you know? I asked her. Because “he’s so rich, he must be Jewish.”

  The Prophet is doing well here. People with migraines come to him and he cures them, he tells the audience. How does he do it? He says to God, Take off their old helmets. God obliges and immediately their headaches are gone.

  Time to read the Bible together. We are to read “Joshua, chapter 8, where Jesus Christ says . . .”

  Wait a sec. How did Jesus get into Joshua?

  Doesn’t matter. Prophets know better.

  Patrick had cancer, he tells his Willing Listeners, but he got rid of it. How? He yelled at the cancer, he screamed at it, “Die!” and it died. That’s it. Done.

  I have nothing to add.

  Another hour or two, and a bunch of people stand on line, wishing to have a prayer moment with the Prophet. He could cure their ills and diseases, after all. I decide to wait as well. I want to interview this guy. My holdings at Goldman Sachs will forever increase in value if only I can get a direct line to my banker.

  “There are three angels with you,” the Prophet says unto me. “One of them with the head of a lion. You have much more influence than you know!”

  Very good. But can we sit down and talk, a little interview, maybe? I ask him. “Not tonight,” he says, “but tomorrow,” right after his morning sermon.

  I show up the morning of morrow but Gaby, who stands next to Patrick, says there will be no interview because “you didn’t show up for the morning sermon.”

  Excuse me?

  “I told you that you must come to the sermon!”

  I have no clue what she’s talking about, and why she gets involved to begin with. Maybe she was having a conversation with my angels and they promised her something, but I’m totally not aware of it. I ask the Prophet to speak for himself, since we’ve arranged this schedule together.

  He’s suddenly quiet, he can’t speak.

  Are we going to sit down and have the interview? He stares at me, this Prophet, his tongue stuck somewhere inside his mouth.

  Say Yes or No, I say unto him, ordering him by the power of my three angels, including the lion-headed one, to answer me. “No,” he says.

  I order the angel with the lion’s head to strike this liar of a prophet for making me come all the way down here for nothing and to immediately depart from this condemned man.

  •••

  Chapter 10

  Culture: A Comedian, a Western Sheikh, Museum Kids, Law Students, Jesus Christ, and King Ludwig

  Once that dark prophet is out of my way, I feel a need for a comedian.

  Horst Tomayer is my man. We meet at a café in Hamburg. The German character has a “visible tendency to obedience,” he says to me. But I’m not interested in obedience. Are Germans funny? I ask him.

  “No. Very little sense of humor. For humor you need brains, and the Germans don’t have them.”

  Say it again!

  “Since the existence of Germany the people here haven’t had brains. Two world wars, the Holocaust . . . Where are the brains?!”

  How can you say that? You g
uys have Mercedes, BMW, VW. They require brains—

  “Technical know-how has nothing to do with wisdom.”

  The most stupid question I can ask Horst, after this introduction, is: Are you proud to be German? But guess what, I ask him exactly this question.

  The man bursts into such a loud laughter that everybody in the café notices us, to put it mildly. When he finally gathers himself, you can hear him, pretty loud, saying: “Never!”

  He is one of those rare leftists who staunchly hates Germany and as staunchly loves Israel. There are Germans like that. Very few, but there are.

  On a serious note, he predicts that “if the euro falls, the national currency will replace the euro and nationalism will rise again.”

  He says that at such a time the Turkish people living in Germany will “maybe” be ordered to leave the country. The Jews, on the other hand, will “ganz klar” (obviously) be ordered out.

  What’s the difference between the Turk and the Jew?

  “The Jew is easier to blame. That’s thousands of years of history.”

  •••

  I leave this affable Horst and go back to Die Zeit, to meet Jens Jessen, a culture editor. He tells me something I never knew:

  “The middle and upper classes read the Bild-Zeitung.”

  Why do you write? Is it just because you like it or because you want to change people’s minds?

  “Yes, to change minds. That’s the driving force, not the mere writing.”

  Why?

  “My basic feeling in life is depression and anger. Normally, I am desperate. I feel there’s so much stupidity and bad thinking. I feel like a desperate teacher.”

  Germans are not the only stupid people on the planet, but “being German makes the stupidity much heavier.”

  Why?

  “Stupidity in Germany is much more dangerous.”

  Why?

  “In culture there are patterns of behavior. My fear is that the totalitarian kind of thinking can come back, like Nazism. I feel the possibility, in little communities . . . There is no sense for diversity in German culture.”

  They need to obey, the Germans? Meaning, it’s not just a cliché . . .?

  “Right. Yes.”

  What’s the root of this need?

  “The wars between Catholics and the Protestants taught the German people that they have to be together in their little community in order to survive. I think this is the reason, I don’t know for sure.”

  What is Die Zeit doing about this?

  “Tries to teach people that you can have liberal discussions without fear. Die Zeit is part of a small club, four media organizations in Germany, that try to do this.”

  Four. Which is the best of the four?

  “Deutschlandfunk [German radio/web] is the best.”

  In what?

  “Everything.”

  What makes them so good?

  “The quality, depth, subjects.”

  I wouldn’t encounter this kind of talk in the United States. No Time editor will be so nice to Newsweek, or vice versa. No one at the New York Times will shy away, in my experience, from saying they are the best. Why can’t you? Is it so hard to say, We are the best?

  “Honor! It’s not honorable to advertise yourself. Definitely not.”

  Is this a German quality?

  Jens wouldn’t fall into this little trap . . .

  No, he says. Spain is the same. Jens also tells me that, after Die Wende (the fall of the Berlin Wall), idealism died in both the east and the west of Germany. Originality is gone, he says, and so is idealism. Everybody is Economically Correct, and nobody wants to lose his job. As he sees it, we live in the Age of Opportunism. The young people, he says by way of example, don’t understand those who died in the fight against Hitler. They ask why those people didn’t just save themselves.

  I like Jens. He’s a smart man, a thinker, a man of honor, and a real gentleman. You won’t find many like him around anymore, if at all. God, or nature, whatever you believe in, doesn’t manufacture any more Jenses. In today’s world of journalism, most are very PC. Not so Jens. He couldn’t care less. He’s an idealist, a word that today is wholly despised. In today’s journalism you don’t write what you think, if you think at all; you write what sells. This is not Jens. He belongs to a different era, an era that exists in legends. Once upon a time, when journalists wrote honestly, there was a man by the name of Jens . . .

  I sit next to Jens, and while I listen to him I feel as if I am in a different place. Not in Germany, and not in the West. The intellectual Western world today preaches only one thing: tolerance. That’s all they have to sell. Everybody is wonderful, and that’s it. All cultures are great, end of story. What they think, deep down, you can’t really tell. Maybe, just a possibility, deep down they think nothing. Maybe deep down is just an empty hole. Tolerance is the code, the flag. And that’s it.

  But Jens tells you what he thinks. His words are harsh. He has no tolerance, not even of his own people. He believes. You can agree with him, or you can disagree with him, but at least you know what he thinks and where he stands. This is so not Western! I’ve been talking to quite a few people in this country for the last few days. I’ve asked them what it means to be German. For the most part, the intellectuals among them were upset with me for asking this question. “You Americans,” some of them said, “like to generalize everything!” Intellectually speaking, this statement is one huge paradox. But let’s leave it. What is interesting is this common thought of “We are all the same. All peoples are the same.” That’s all they know. If this is intellectualism, I am Bavarian.

  Yeah. I feel like I’m in another place, in a different world. But where? No, not in Israel. That country is very Western-thinking as well. Shallow. I feel as if I’m in the Arab Middle East. This Jens makes me feel so. Maybe I am in the Middle East. Maybe this German-accented English speaker across the table from me is in reality a sheikh. Sheikh Jens bin Mustafa. I go often to the Middle East. I talk to the people there and I am delighted to listen to them. No, not because I agree with them or because I disagree with them. Has nothing to do with it. It’s because they are not empty inside. They might have no “tolerance,” but I still respect them. Tremendously. They have something they stand for. It’s not empty inside. I have had many honest dialogues with the “intolerant” people of the East but to date not a single one with the “tolerant” people of the West. The reason is very simple: The tolerant people of the West are the most intolerant people you can imagine. They are so afraid that you will uncover the emptiness inside them that the moment you start arguing with them their first instinct is: Kill him!

  That said, I feel depressed after leaving Sheikh Jens. I need time to think, to collect my thoughts. But not here, not in Hamburg. It’s a beautiful city, Hamburg, but the atmosphere here, the human atmosphere, is a bit too cold for my taste. I’m not making a generalization. It’s just what I feel.

  I keep my thoughts to myself. I don’t tell the natives what I think of them. It’s too dangerous. Hamburgers are very emotional about their city. Mention the word Elbe and these cold people suddenly become very warm. A man can talk to you about his wife as if she were a tree, no emotions; but talk to him about the trees of Hamburg and he gets extremely romantic. Women are the same. I don’t know how they do it.

  Don’t tell them I said it! Hamburg is the World Capital of Militant Bicyclists, and if they know I have some reservations about them they might kill me.

  No, I’m not kidding. I was schlepping two suitcases the other day, and the bicyclists here were torturing me. On a narrow sidewalk, which could contain either me with my suitcases or a flying Hamburg militia, as I call them, the militia demanded first right of passage. I had to squeeze myself to a tree so that the militia could pass. Then another militia arrived. Same thing. There was nothing I could do. With their bicycles they are ticking human bombs. I had to stop walking so many times, more than the av
erage man in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment of it some years back. And I was thinking to myself: Interesting how animalistic people can become if only they think that the law is on their side. Maybe we should send a delegation of these Militant Bicyclists to the Middle East. They will get peace going there in one day, maximum.

  Anyway, right or wrong, I’m leaving. I am heading south. Guess where? To Munich. Again. I’d rather spend my time with Sister Jutta-Maria than with a screaming Hamburger militia.

  •••

  As I make my way to Munich I watch Al Jazeera TV. Thanks to my iPad, I can watch cable TV on the go. Al Jazeera has two TV stations, one in Arabic and one in English, and two websites, also in Arabic and in English. The English part and the Arabic part are diametrically opposed. The English one is moderate, more or less like the British BBC. The Arabic part is more extreme than Hamas. For whatever reason, which I’m not clear about, this fact remains a secret in the West. But this fact does not mean that Al Jazeera Arabic is not interesting. On the contrary, it’s much more interesting than its English sibling. Here I can watch news I see nowhere else.

  At this very moment they carry a live broadcast from some flotilla that makes its way into Gaza from Turkey. Sheikh Raed Salah, of the Islamic Movement in Israel, is currently giving a little speech. As is his usual routine, he incites the crowd against Jews. Raed Salah can easily claim the title “Biggest Anti-Semite in the Muslim World.” Or, being that he’s an Arab, the Biggest Jew Hater. Raed, who previously accused Jews of mixing the blood of non-Jewish children into their breads, is getting a lot of applause here. The Turkish government wholeheartedly supports this flotilla and this Raed, but if I were Muslim I would sink the flotilla right now. These people make Muslims look like total idiots. They call themselves “peace activists” and “human-rights activists,” but their peace is the peace of the cemetery. As a Saudi man in Riyadh told me two years ago, when I asked him if he thought that peace was possible: “Yes. As it says in this Holy Book, all Jews die and there be peace between all.” He imagined a big Peace Cemetery, where all the Jews will be buried. “We don’t fight cemeteries,” he said, a big smile on his face.