Ringing bells are part of the German soundscape. Germans hardly ever notice them, foreigners in Germany almost always do. After years of hearing them, Glocken just elicit a sort of contemplative feeling among Germans. To an immigrant like Avrom Nahum Stencl, who left his native Poland and his Hassidic family behind when he immigrated to Berlin in 1921 after the Russian army came calling, the bells of Berlin were a provocation. After he shaved his beard off, Stencl could never go home again to his religious community in Czeladź, where his brother had become Chief Rabbi. And why should he, when the Berlin poet Else Lasker-Schüler liked his poetry so much, she hung out with him non-stop at the artsy Romanisches Café and even gave him an exoticized, mythical name, Hamid, when she wrote about him in her own poetry? But still, you can take the boy out of the shtetl, but the shtetl rarely leaves the boy. And so, like many immigrants to Berlin, Stencl was both attracted and repelled by the resonances of the incessant German church bells. He writes, in Yiddish:
berlin-
a blinder turem in mitn shtot
mit a glatn tsiferblat
glin-glon! – a levaye? a khupe?
glin-glon! glin-glon! – s’brent? az tsu zuntik-tfile?
glin-glon! glin-glon! glin-glon! glin-glon!
un az got vert geboyrn – – –
__________________________
Berlin-
A blind tower in the middle of the city
With a plain clock-face
Ding dong! A funeral? A wedding?
Ding dong! Ding dong! Is something burning? To go to Sunday prayers?
Ding dong! Ding dong! Ding dong! Ding dong!
As if God is being born.
And then I wonder: in today’s rather secular Germany, will those bells one day have to compete in public in certain parts of Berlin with the azan, the call to prayer from a minaret? If the German bells brought up anxious thoughts in an apostate Jewish immigrant, to whom, then, is today’s loudspeaker from a mosque a provocation? Not to those who hear those bells today like Stencl did in the 1920s. But maybe to those who believe the bell tolls for everyone the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2lLjlEQRYM