I was a country once. I was Jordan in the mini United Nations. They passed out countries
like baseball cards and we solved the “Palestinian Question” in just five months (in eighth grade).
We tabled the problem at desks that made a hexagon when shoved together. Negotiations lasted
up to our final deadline, when, EUREKA!
We proposed a landfill (!) as a new home for the Palestinians. Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if
we could take everybody's refuse and build a new island? We were considered thrifty (little did
we know, Staten Island had already thought of it). We drafted a letter to Arafat and sent it off to
whatever lucky middle school got to be the PLO. It's amazing what you can do with countries in
your mind.
1
verboten
Tanya Karini's parents broke it to me that I must be German, though I was
suffering at that moment in hot Russian knickers and an oversize peasant blouse. My
Russian grandparents had helped me dress for the fourth grade culture fair, and I milled
around the gymnasium in itchy Russian clothing, like a wilting Cossak dancer. The
Karinis suggested, we, the Sniders, were actually German Jews somewhere deep inside
ourselves. I could be wearing a muslin dress. I daydreamed about this costume change
against the pattering of Patrick Heinz’s Irish step dance, which he performed with pink
cheeks the size and shape of two blush cakes.
Snider is derived from the German word for “tailor,” Schneiderman, but the
Germanic legacy and the art of sewing evade me. My sister, however, is a deft
seamstress, and moved to Berlin last September.
On the day she left, I escorted her to the Lufthansa terminal where we sat waiting
in a wash of bright Lufthansa yellow, a color which suggested her travel might be
something like Sesame Street with wings. There were no pictures at the terminal to
illustrate what Germany itself would be like, though, and Steffi had never been there
before.
When the airport attendants scanned her through the metal detector, she
whispered, "I can't believe I am allowed to go to Germany."
2
Before she left, many people said to my sister, "Berlin is not really like Germany.
It's an international city, just like Paris," implying that real Germany might be something
less pleasurable, something to avoid. I watched my sister walk away until she was the
size of a small gumdrop.
It occurred to me at the Lufthansa terminal, that my knowledge of Germany had
not progressed significantly in the twenty-one years since my visit to Epcot, when I tried
to visit little Germany-in-Orlando with my grandparents and my sister.
In 1981, Epcot Germany emitted something cheerful, music by which to knock
your knees. My sister and I faced the Bavarian pavilion and watched its visitors leave the
compound with jumbo hot dogs and pretzels. Inside, I imagined the visitors flapped their
arms to music made by yodeling ladies, German Swiss Misses, if their arms were not
already filled with heavy steins of beer. Beer in Epcot, of course, might actually be
sparkling cider or flat apple juice. We would never know the alcoholic proof for certain
since my grandfather made it clear from his wheelchair that Epcot Germany was
verboten. We pushed my grandfather's wheelchair past the compound while imagining
those luckier children eating knockwurst, drinking kiddy-beer and grooving to techno
beats. "It's PLAStic," I whined (emphasis on the silent 'the-world-is-so-unfair'), still
believing I could make my grandparents sweet on Germany, just as I foolishly believed I
could convince them that eighty degrees was too hot to wear thick, wool sweaters.
3
I was nine years old on this trip to Florida and all Jewish children my age had
already been haunted with stories of Nazi Germany, the collective force that stole
children and parents at night from their homes, stories so unbelievable, where bad things
do come true—stories where children were put in ovens. My father's father had shared
his hiding story, describing an architecture whose dimensions I retooled periodically. I
first understood that he hid in a small toilet in Russia. I later deduced that he had actually
lifted the toilet to descend into the secret compartment beneath the porcelain prop, where
he hid until he could travel safely in a small boat to the United States.
did grandpa hide in here?
no, in here.
The connection between the toilet-annex and Bavaria was real but unclear, and I
presented this disconnect doggedly in front of Epcot Germany. My grandfather was
recovering from a triple bypass while we scaled Space Mountain and still I believed I was
4
smarter because I knew this "Germany" wasn't Germany at all; it was an imagined
community. I wanted to know how something plastic could really be good or evil,
whether plastic was capable of good and evil, contained any moral character whatsoever.
I would be going into Bavarian Germany with horned helmets and folk dances, a
different place. But my grandfather did not want us to see Epcot Germany without
remembering the Holocaust, distracted by a mound of sauerkraut and an Oompah band.
Eventually, we accepted this. Most of my grandfather's family had escaped the
concentration camps and this made him a specific kind of survivor, a survivor who
escaped rather than witnessed. But maybe this made the general horror boundless for
him as it did for many Jews then, and as it does for many Jews now who identify more
strongly with the Holocaust than they might identify even with their own Jewishness.
When my grandfather shook his head, he was saying to us at once: “you must
understand" and "you can't understand" and so we've strapped ourselves to this task of
knowing that we can never know Germany the way he knows it, though he has never
traveled there himself. I tried to understand my Grandfather's Germany, picking up
cultural clues from approved sources, then added information from accidental encounters,
resulting in an eclectic composite made from Holocaust museums, cartoons, and Sunday
School teachers:
THINGS I KNOW ABOUT GERMANY
Haribo candy
Kinder chocolate
5
Beer steins
Octoberfest
Nazis
Concentration Camps
Mercedes-Benz
Volkswagen
Neitzche
Berlin Wall
Camp counselor with bad body odor
Cartoon about girl trapped on other side of wall from family
Kraftwerk
Neu
Knowckwurst
Bratwurst
Leiderhosen
"gezundheit"
Augustus Gloop, if he is not Austrian
At Temple Beth El, we began as young architects of civilization, building small
biblical models for the annual diorama competition. We built entire families into boxes
we converted into small harvest huts—one room at a time, one shoebox per room. The
rules were simple: build a Sukkah, a small hut like those built by Jewish nomads in the
desert during harvest season. The eaves lay spaced apart on the "top" (side) of the
"house" (box). We cut into brand names like Buster Brown and Zips for the strips of sky
to come through, down to the little people, rendering words on the box into semiabstraction, only half-obliterating our present. No matter how biblical the scene, you
often ended up stuffing plastic Fischer-Price people into place if you didn't feel like
making them, though these figures were conspicuously coifed and blonde for desert Jews.
It was okay if you stuck mini Coke cans on the family's table, which was made from a
sewing thread's spool. Biblical desert according to suburban Detroit.
6
My confidence in replicating world history out of clay and cardboard and general
vapors (movies, television, books, etc) waned when I encountered Mrs. Stern, a leathery
lady with a smoker's croak who made it her mission to teach all the seventh graders at
Temple about the Holocaust. Mrs. Stern told us many unsettling things.
"Kids, don't ever forget the number six million, "she said. "That is the number of
people who died in the Holocaust. Many of them were children. Six million…" She said
the number over and over.
[sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
7
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillionsixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion
sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion sixmillion]
"...just like you," she said. And just in case Mrs. Stern had not made her point
clear enough, she added: "That's like someone knocking on your door tomorrow." Nazis.
And we would be unprepared.
8
Mrs. Stern was not a good storyteller—she always skipped to the end and the end
was always tragic, sordid, or frightening, her eyes popping wide open for emphasis. She
was the woman who told us the story about the shoe flying across the room that hit the
boy in the temple and he died and the boy who fell through the unfrozen ice and died, and
the girl who sat on the open scissors, and the pencil that stuck in the (same?) boy's eye
and he didn't die but he no longer saw.
Her curriculum was ALARMIST, and went well with my day school’s lessons in
which most recently, a firefighter had concluded his fire safety presentation by
encouraging all students to pack a small bag or suitcase with "disaster" necessities — a
blanket, etc—to keep under our beds. These notions of imminent doom became an extracurricular preoccupation as well. I played the "Hitler's coming" game to go to sleep each
night.
In this game, I imagined I was floating on a glacier-like body—my bed—with
over forty stuffed animals. Only those children and animals who looked asleep would
live. Not only did you have to pantomime sleep but you had to have the subtle
sophistication to know this involved some mumbling and tossing. Only a person faking
sleep is still. A real sleeping person is never fearful of looking awake. I'd play until I
fooled myself into a real sleep, the first cycles of REM.
Mrs. Stern told us the story of the Benz family. The Benz story was simple: the
Benz family (of Mercedes-Benz family fame) provided the gas for the gas chambers in
the Holocaust.
9
"Don't ever get into a Mercedes-Benz," she growled. The news was bad. My
mother showed up that day to take me home in her old maroon Mercedes wagon. When I
refused to get into the car, she told me to suit myself, with full confidence that my
transportation options were slim in the suburbs at age twelve. My boycott was selective
and brief but I always remembered the blood was on our hands when we rode in the
wagon. It surprised me then, two years later, when I visited Israel and the streets were
filled with Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks. When I inquired about this conspicuous
presence, I was told that Mercedes-Benz had cut a deal with the state of Israel, and
offered a shipment of cars as reparations.
How did this work?
A] Here are some cars?
B] Here are some coupons for cars?
C] Let's make a deal?
My grandparents only drove American cars. In Metropolitan Detroit, we regularly
visited the Henry Ford Museum as a weekend excursion, which paid tribute to the
invention of the automobile and was also part of the larger living-history center of
Greenfield Village. Here, you can visit the chair where Abraham Lincoln was shot,
extracted from the Springfield, Illinois theater. My grandparents held onto their
10
prejudices selectively. Never mind, by the way, that Henry Ford was a reputed antiSemite. My grandparents sought refuge in fake comforts like non-Germany, or nonGermanness even when those alternatives presented problematic Americanness. It was
more important that the Ford cars delivered them from the German market even though
the American auto industry wasn't doing anything good for the Jewish man or woman.
Henry Ford published two documents, at least one of which he distributed throughout his
factory, the infamous “Protocols of Elder Zion,” and “The International Jew:The World's
Foremost Problem (Recently, Ford Motors sponsored the airing of Schindler's List on
NBC)". Just up the road, Father Coughlin was preaching the same anti-Semitic racket and
my great-aunt Mimmy spit out her American car's window every time she passed
Coughlin's church on Woodward Avenue, even after he died in 1979.
When I remember Mrs. Stern, I begin to think I sometimes collapsed my idea of
Germany with its histrionic messenger. I might have confused her harsh delivery with
Germany itself. If she told us of storybook Germany, she told us storybook Israel, too,
imploring that we join the Zionist movement if we were worth our kosher salt, though
most of us were counting down the days until our bar or bat mitzvahs when we'd quit
Sunday School. Here, I experienced some imaginary Jewishness in an imagined
community. I knew the entire Hebrew school carpool hated me and it might have hinged
on something small and secular like not wearing a large banana clip in my hair. That
wasn’t very pious at all — where was their rachmones? I figured I had plenty of non-
11
Jewish friends waiting for me who had no plans to live in trailers in the occupied
territories. I never learned much about Germany beyond my lessons in Sunday School,
but took it upon myself as my responsibility to be self-righteous, as a general attitude,
about something, anything, since righteousness skips generations, I believe. It was my
turn to be indignant about the Holocaust. Now, I am dissatisfied with my Germany made
from Mrs. Stern and made of the knockwurst, leiderhosen, the Alps my undisciplined
mind borrows from the Swiss, about my ignorance, which is cluttered with an excess of
images.
I confess — I sometimes forget that I did travel once to Germany, several years
before my sister moved there. I visited Munich briefly when I left college. I stayed with
nuns in a tall boarding house located in the red-light district, a short walk from the train
station. In my narrow bed, I read Sophie's Choice straight through in two days while
coughing up bright green sputum and slugging down Dr Trink's multivitamin juice. No
one spoke English and I learned only the German word for "juice" which I have now
forgotten.
On the third day, I emerged from the boarding house and took a short bus ride to
Dachau. I visited the concentration camp through the haze of a heavy rain, Sophie's
Choice, and mucus, like sleepwalking. Mostly, while there, I thought about Steven
Spielberg's insistence that we preserve the crumbling concentration camps as evidence,
12
while those opposed argue we should let the camps fall. Why spend money on Nazi
artistry? Would this, people have argued, make it Epcot Dachau?
Back at Greenfield Village, conservators are scratching their heads over the very
same pickle: How to preserve the blood on Lincoln's chair now that it's fading. How to
keep it real.
In my travel journal, I made assorted notes on Germany:
On Dachau, I wrote:
How could one say s/he lived in the town of Dachau? What a shameful
history. The Holocaust leaves you with an impossible kind of mourning to do—
self-indulgent, melodramatic or merely inadequate. Dachau was almost a park.
In more assorted, paranoid moments, I wrote:
How the hell did I end up in Germany?! I'm scared here. It is hard to deduce
much of anything. The tourist office is closed. In fact, I don't even know the name of
the station I'm in. Last night a Christina Crosby doppelganger [a professor of
mine—and score three points for German word] sat beside me and scarfed down
what appeared to be softened deep-fried Trix cereal, which I imagine has some name
like "schnitzel." It's apparently quite acceptable to stare here. I guess sausage is
very "in" here. I thought the cashier was going to beat me over the head with her
ladle.
Why do the nuns hate me?
And why hasn't anyone said "gezundheit" when I sneeze?
And why was the man next to me on the train carrying a five-foot sword and a
cream pie, in black leiderhosen, accompanied by another man in black leiderhosen
13
and a woman in green velvet with pinched cleavage? Why weren't the two men in
black leiderhosen speaking to one another?
Abruptly, in a most revealing nonsequitur, I state my desire to flee:
They are now trying to find the Yeti in
China/Tibet. Maybe I can help (?).
I barely made it back from the Dachau excursion before the ten o'clock curfew
when the nuns lock the doors to the boarding house and leave all the tardy boarders to the
wolves on the strasse. Inside, all the girls were eating cake in their nightgowns. None of
these events managed to lift the shroud of mystery surrounding Germany; its forbidden
character was merely scrambled by the surreal details of the experience. In fact,
Germany's reality didn't stick. Ultimately, though, I experienced these things German
with a sense of entitlement; I felt entitled to feel squeamish.
Cleveland’s newspaper, The Plain Dealer, recently reported that Germany's
Jewish population now exceeds 100,000 for the first time in post-Hitler Germany.
Germany's Jewish community before Hitler's rise numbered over 500,000. The new
movement of Jews back into Germany constitutes the most accelerated migration of Jews
in the world. Last year, the Jewish Museum in Berlin opened after many false starts and
architectural snafus. In 2004, Berlin will install a new Holocaust memorial near
Brandenburg Gate, designed to suggest a large cemetery, and will be built on top of an
underground education center. The question remains for Germans and Jews (and German
14
Jews): What does Germany owe? Is debt relevant to the youngest generation of Jews
and non-Jews in Germany? Thousands of Jews more closely tied to the Holocaust than I,
are crossing the borders into Germany. In recent years, Daimler-Benz published a
document chronicling its cooperation with the Nazi regime entitled "Forced Labor at
Daimler-Benz" and attempts to contact people involved in the forced labor for
reconciliation. Still, many Jews around the world and other veterans of World War II
boycott German products, including Bayer aspirin, Krupps and Braun products, and
Mercedes-Benz cars.
My grandparents once comforted themselves by buying American cars and now
even these conceits are impossible. Those who vowed to buy American are betrayed by
the car companies themselves, corporations like Chrysler who merged with Daimler Benz over one year ago, one nation divisible after all, grafted onto another. The
Mercedes-Benz homepage advertises its own global vision; "In a perfect world, everyone
would drive a Mercedes."
My more personal question is why didn't Munich stick? Maybe it's my
Americanness—my interest in models, dioramas, and Epcot, and my interest in the fake.
What use is the myth? Especially when it contains two sensibilities so starkly opposed,
such as warm, hearty stews and human cruelty, cuckoo clocks and black shiny boots? I
15
did briefly think I might use more sociological methods to gather specific information
about Germany, and sent a short questionnaire to my sister after her first week in Berlin.
16
QUESTIONAIRE FOR FRAU SISTER STEPHANIE SNIDER (use back if necessary)
1. What does Germany look like?
2. What do you see in front of you?
3. Do Germans wear brown muslin? Can you be sure?
4. What are you eating?
5. Are you scared?
6. Do you think about the Holocaust more in Germany than you do in the United States?
7. Do people stare?
8. What do you think Epcot Germany looks like?
9. What does it sound like?
10. Would you marry a Jewish German man?
11. Would you marry a non-Jewish German man?
12. Is German posture different?
13. How is your posture?
17
ANSWERS
1. It is very beautiful, wooded, with a huge lake called the Wannsee. This area looks
like a German Bloomfield Hills — an incredible mixture of old and new. I play a
game where I count all the cranes I can see from the S-Bahn (elevated train),
…lots of new buildings for the former empty spaces…usually in the former east.
2. I can see the grounds of the American Academy and the lake, the Wannsee.
There are also many sailboats docked nearby.
3. No brown muslin yet, but I imagine they do in Heidelberg or maybe in Bremen
4. Weinerschnitzel, bratwurst, currywurst, sauerkraut, and of course mineralwasser.
5. Not yet
6. Yes, without question. You sometimes find yourself asking yourself, somewhat
casually, could I hide there?
7. Yes. I wonder if it is because I look Jewish? I am not sure but they definitely do.
8. It probably looks like old German tudor-esque with brick and plaster, very much
like the fairy-tales!
9. There is a man at the Kunstlerhaus Benthanien with the last name of "Liebkuche."
I like this name because it literally means "love cake." One hears "Ah so," which I
think means "Oh, yes" and also "Tchuss!" which means see you later. Also
"weider" which means again.
10. Yes, maybe
11. Yes, maybe
18
12. Not that I can tell
13. I think it's better!
19
EPILOGUE
Each phone call from my sister punctured my German fantasy life and I
necessarily scaled back the Germanworld which I had begun to think of as almost smurflike or schtrumpf-like—each busy German doing his or her part in a buzzing mushroom
town with simple personalities (smiley, lazy, selfish, wise). Steffi called me in Brooklyn
with terribly boring (by comparison) regional news—the S-Bahn, the art scene, the old
man she likes to visit on Fridays—and then she said her new neighborhood, just outside
of Berlin, looked like the suburb where we grew up.
Just when I thought it might be time for me to catch up with the Germany of
today, I received a panicked call from Steffi on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.
Earlier that day, an older Jewish man and woman had visited the Academy where my
sister now lived. The woman told my sister that her family had lived in the large house
until they were forced out by Hitler, and she then pointed to the area underneath the
building, which she identified as one of Hitler’s favorite bunkers. My sister could not
believe she was now living on top of an SS bunker, and walked around chilled for several
weeks while
the other residents got by with a small shudder. She began to build small models of
bunkers out of wood and cardboard, impossible architectural structures with no way out,
and painted them gray.
20
By November, I could hear a new inflection in my sister’s voice and eventually, I
could hear her sighing or stumbling in German instead of English. I heard a lot of “Ah,
zo”s and “er”s instead of “um”s. Her facility with the language came in handy when she
broke her nose in a shopping mall and was forced to describe to the doctor—in German
—what her nose once looked like. And my sister couldn’t help but make the most evident
observation—she was a Jewish woman with a nose job in Germany. I told Steffi it really
was like the suburb where we grew up, where the girls there wore Band-Aids across the
bridge of their noses, too, when they fixed them (which they frequently did). Her nose
was reset to its former shape though my sister still complains it’s now larger instead of
smaller, and she walked with her hands near her face for many weeks after the accident,
believing our faces to be exceedingly vulnerable.
It took me eight months and several small gifts of courtship from my sister to
make a trip to Berlin and I couldn’t help but check the toilets once I got there, lifting up
the seats and tugging at their immovable porcelain bases. When I heard the German
language, I remembered my previous visit; sounds like doors shutting in faces,
interrupted and harsh with so many consonants pushed together. But it sounded like my
grandparents, too, who spoke Yiddish when they did not want us, the kinder, to
understand what they were saying.
My touring itinerary was based on the must-see sites of Berlin plus freestyle
ambling, limited by gray weather and mutual depression. We mixed up a little
21
Checkpoint Charlie with several museums and an American movie. To my sister’s
chagrin and my delight, my visit coincided with Berlin’s five-day Bavaria festival. The
food-servers under decorative tents were actually impersonating themselves! It was like
the German Culture Fair for Germans. With costumes made of thick felt materials. This
only helped to confuse the regional distinctions upon which Steffi insisted. Eventually,
she gave in and took me to the beergarden/petting zoo combination after several museum
trips. I did feel some personal triumph that I could match vague homegrown fantasies
with these real sightings, like pulling a second matching card in a game of Memory.
When my sister left for Germany last year, she planned to visit Berlin for 8
months on a fellowship. Now, 17 months later, I guess she lives there. After September
11, she was shaky and determined that we not drink the water here in the United States.
She followed up this instruction with a panicked phone call proposing that my family
immediately relocate to Berlin, where we would temporarily live with her in her
apartment. Steffi reconceived of Germany as a safe harbor, and her home as a possible
family bunker. Weeks later, when terrorists were arrested in Germany and the German
government proposed iris scans at airport checkpoints, Steffi threatened to leave
Germany.
“If the iris scans are approved, I am leaving,” she said. I reminded her that the
Amsterdam Airport already used iris scans to ID passengers.
22
“But it’s different in Germany.” Steffi was describing a resonance with which she
experiences Germany, a loyalty to a collective bodily memory of final selection.
There wasn’t so much obvious Germanness in Berlin, or maybe there was and I
couldn’t recognize it because I was looking for something different. I wondered if people
were staring at me in Berlin, and in my preoccupation, I would often lock eyes with a
poor commuter who I’d been challenging to stare at me for extended periods of time.
When someone did stare, I felt triumphant until I realized that it most often turned out to
be someone staring back. I made myself conspicuous preemptively.
I feared the reality of Germany would seep like a large inkblot over my tangled
myth but somehow, the two realms of reality and fantasy don’t even seem interested in
one another.
Even my most progressive Jewish friends feel half-comfortable hating Germany
in an uncharacteristically inherited rather than political stance, forcing ourselves into
caricatures of Jews making caricatures of Germans, cartoon images airy and expandable
like comics imprinted on silly putty. And this caricatured Jew feels unwilling to give
Germany the understanding with which s/he gives his/her own country, the United States,
which is, itself, an exemplary model of unspeakable crime and virtue. Most of the people
we believe we are honoring with emotional sanctions are dead or dying and we, in truth,
actually like to read the great thinkers of Germany and celebrate the great artists of
Germany, secretly, away from our Grandparents. Max Weber himself, a German man,
23
was the one to first articulate the concept of charisma, which theoretically explained the
very mechanism by which someone like Hitler came to power.
I don’t think myths die when they’re proven wrong but instead when they become
boring. My imagination eventually feels as though it’s reached its limit on a topic and
there is nothing left to riff on, even the riff has been riffed. My grandfather assumed the
manic cuckoos and Oompahs would convert me to a friend of Germany. Epcot Germany
might actually have been menacing and garish in its optimism. Certainly, Epcot’s
Germany is dated. It doesn’t speak of the New Germany, the new Berlin. Berlin may be
part of the Brave New World in all senses— a pioneering city with a brand new post-wall
life, but a city with spies in the midst, even if it is history and our paranoid fantasies that
watch over us.
24