Towards the end of our three-hour tour of Dachau, walking through the parted rows of poplar trees and freely out through the gates that read Arbeit Macht Frei, our German guide’s voice quivered for the first time as he said, “…what we did to ourselves here, and what we all lost.” We? A presumptuous pairing for a German to make here, I first thought.
But his sincerity – and the omnipresence of Holocaust memorials we later encountered throughout Munich, Nuremberg, and Berlin – reshaped my Weltanschauung: I began to see that the world of Jewish Holocaust memory in which I grew up was only half the sphere. The other half surfaced in Stolperstein glinting from cobblestones, Nuremberg laws recounted on street signs, lists of concentration camps outside train stations, #WeRemember posters at tram stops bearing the faces of survivors, the long Israeli flag that still hangs on Munich’s city hall, the memorial in Berlin of large concrete steles numbering the pages of the Talmud, the elderly woman on the train visibly ecstatic to meet her first Jew, and “Never Again” – we were told again and again – proclaimed as a Staatsräson.
Just as the core of the modern Jewish psyche is not Genesis but Auschwitz, I came to understand that the strongest gravitational force shaping modern German self-understanding – personal and political – is not Goethe but the black hole their ancestors carved into history. Seeing the inverse imprint of intergenerational trauma reflected something of my own experience back to me, bridging, however slightly, the chasm of unfathomable suffering I had long felt between German and Jew.
And yet, even in Berlin, Germany’s most diverse city, I was independently told by several Jews and Germans that it is inadvisable to wear a yarmulke, as hate crimes against Jews – by native Germans – have been on the rise. The gap between commemorating murdered Jews and protecting living ones seemed not unrelated to Germany’s patterns of selectivity in remembering other victim groups. I wondered why it took, and is still taking, so long to commemorate homosexuals (2008), Sinti and Roma (2012), and “asocial” people – a broad, voiceless group yet to be formally memorialized.
The politics of memory inevitably entwines with the politics of present. The injustices done to other groups of Germany’s past, and to vulnerable peoples in today’s wider world, force “us” – Germans and Jews alike – to wrestle with a tension between two interpretations of Never Again: 1) Never again to the Jews, and 2) Never again to any people, on any scale, under any pretense. Both of us have understandably placed greater weight on the first, but an imbalance in these Nevers today risks Jews echoing behaviors of their persecutors – and Germans finding themselves on the wrong side of history, Again.