Today I bought a Yahrtzeit candle. The place where I usually get them didn’t have any left. (Yes, you read that right, “them”. I could just buy them in bulk, but I won’t.) So the owner explained the way to a different shop. “And then you get to a corner. There’s a policeman, but that’s not where the shop is.” The implication being that because there’s a policeman something Jewish must be nearby. And that’s true, of course – a “sad reality” and all that.
The Jüdisches Museum had an exhibition called “Berlin Transit” last year, on Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in the 20s. I actually really liked that exhibiton – because it managed to be as open as possible while still not denying that all the doors are shut. There was a room with photos taken in the Scheunenviertel. For example: a handful of policemen cornering an elderly Jew during a raid. “Those inclined can intuit what will happen in the years after that.” I wrote at the time.
The “those inclined” part is important though. What I didn’t write: that of course it’s not highly unlikely that some of those policemen were Jews as well. That’s the startling, sometimes disturbing, but always fascinating part of reading things from the 20s: that German Jews of course were part of a larger society, so they sometimes shared that society’s prejudices.
I’m not even talking about heady stuff like “Der deutsche Vortrupp”, or even Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s membership of the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene. Just little asides you sometimes find, like Tucholsky advising everybody to read Otto Weininger, and not because you have to know your enemy either. Because the “before” and the “after” loom so large – and they should – these things make you go “hmmm”, at least in the beginning. Maybe that’s the flipside to “s/he saw it coming”. (Just to be clear: I’m not talking about complicity.)
That’s a position I’m sometimes reluctant to embrace. Other times I just can’t help it – like when I saw the model of the apparatus from “In der Strafkolonie” in the Kafka Museum in Prague. What is gained from that position I’m still not sure, beyond fatalistic apocalypticism I mean. But if we, while looking at a text, make an effort to keep in mind what came before it, why not go the other way as well?
Though even the notion of time itself is sometimes disputed. At University we once talked about a German short story from 1951 that to me seemed to be very clearly a bitterly satirical explanation of how Nazi Germany worked and the Shoah could happen. Of course those two things weren’t mentioned, but they were clearly what the writer had in mind. Because how could he not, as one of the few conscious non-revisionist German writers at that time. Another student then said that approaching a text the time of its creation should be totally irrelevant. I’m pretty sure that just post-modern mumbo jumbo though.
Maybe the reason why “s/he saw it coming” is so uncomfortable because the unspoken questions seems to be: what if? But “what if?”, unlike “why?/why not?” really isn’t a fruitful question when it comes to history. Unless you’re Niall Ferguson of course. In which case I bid you farewell, but not before I ask you how that whole neo-colonial project is coming along, and also which ideology is paying for your ugly-ass brown jackets this week.
Anyway. And then I found the shop – which was also guarded by the policeman – and got the candle. On the way to the subway I saw a man – a frummer, burly, with a bushy beard. Like a shtetl butcher – or maybe just how a Jew in Berlin imagined what a shtetl butcher looked like in the 20s.