I can no longer count how many times I have heard Jewish expats from the USA say: “Germany is the safest place for Jews.” Occasionally, Israeli Jews also emphasize that there is hardly any place as safe for them as Germany. It always ends with the statement: “Here, people have come to terms with their past.”
I almost always hear this from people who live in Berlin. And that’s where it starts: Berlin is not Germany, and Berlin is not the same as Berlin. My life in Lichtenberg was an anti-Semitic hell. But what really infuriates me about the sentence about Germany being supposedly so safe is that it represents the essence of Berlin’s expat bubbles, who in their arrogance simply ignore what Jews who grew up here have to say about it.
In doing so, they are declaring the voices of Jews who grew up here, who understand the culture and the specific subtext, irrelevant. They are perpetuating a fairy tale of security and coming to terms with the past that contradicts the conditions and grievances that Jews who grew up here are emphatically and sometimes desperately drawing attention to.
It is not without reason that sociologist Michal Bodemann calls this “process of coming to terms with the past” “memory theater” and author Max Czollek calls it “reconciliation theater.” It leads to all, really all, of my adult, non-Jewish workshop participants answering the question “Where did you learn something about Judaism?” by saying they went to school and repeating what they learned by mentioning the number of Jewish Holocaust victims, concentration camps and anti-Jewish laws. They are unable to recognize that this is primarily knowledge of the crimes committed by the Germans.
And what about security? Does this mean the security that we grew up with anti-Semitic insults in elementary school? The security that is constantly Jewish cemeteries desecrated and synagogues are attacked? And the certainty that we still have to beg for every bit of police protection that is taken for granted in other European countries? It’s all to no avail: the myth of Berlin as Germany’s Jewish pony farm persists.