At the beginning, Germany was the place my father was from, a place that made me different from all the kids in my neighborhood with American parents except for my next-door neighbor Kurt, whose mother, like my father, was also German, but somehow much moreso. Even though her English, like my father's, was unaccented, she seemed somehow to still have a foot on the far side of a line that my father had irrevocably crossed; she was, in some way, still German. Sometimes she dressed Kurt in lederhosen and knee socks. Their house at Christmastime had a real pine tree, not an artificial one like the other neighbors', with real candles on it that struck even my very young eyes as an awful fire hazard, and antique, faintly foreign-looking ornaments. In their dining room each winter was an elaborate gingerbread house whose design seemed to come out of a German storybook. Kurt and his brother and sisters called their parents “Mutti” and “Vatti,” and Mutti and Vatti sometimes called Kurt “Kuertchen,” which sounded to the rest of us in the neighborhood a lot like “cushion,” which could not have made his life easy.
Germany was the odd way my father counted under his breath when checking a waitress's addition on a restaurant bill. It perplexed me: in this moment, and only this moment, his English vanished, replaced by a huffing, rhythmic counting in words that sounded to my inexperienced ears as if they consisted mostly of the letter “f,” lots of broad, flat vowels, and some not-so-gentle throat-clearing. “That's how I learned to count,” he would say when I asked, but it always felt a little ominous to me, a reminder that there was some part of him that functioned in a way I could not understand.
And Germany was, of course, the place my Oma and Opa were from. Germany was everything about the décor of their apartment, the food they served on rare occasions when we ate with them, their strong accents, the old volumes of books on the shelves that were all the same color and differed only in the numbers on the spine, books I would later learn were the works of Goethe and Schiller. It was the language blaring on their shortwave radio – “Deutsche Welle,” West Germany's overseas broadcast service, they would explain with raised voices before shutting it off to welcome us.
Then, in 1972, Germany became a summer vacation destination. I was nine, nearly ten, and don't remember too much. I recall a somewhat frightening elderly great-aunt we visited at a retirement home in a place my father called the “Black Forest,” which sounded mysterious and foreboding to me in anticipation, but struck me as neither much of a forest nor particularly black once we arrived. And I remember West Berlin, mostly for its ruined church in the middle of the city that struck me as an eyesore and for a museum with frightening black-and-white photos of people dead in a barbed-wire fence and other people jumping out of windows to what I was told was “freedom,” even though to me it just looked like the street behind their apartment building. I remember a place with the friendly name “Checkpoint Charlie,” and I remember standing on an elevated platform that gave us a view into “East Berlin,” a place that looked to me like the same old and bleak city I was already in, but bleaker and emptier.
And Germany was (I then mistakenly believed) the place where my great-uncle had died. He was Opa's brother. He was Leopold, and I was named for him, in a way. My middle name was unusual for a boy – Leigh – and my parents told me it was for Leopold, who had died before I was born. “Poor Leopold.” Poor, one-armed Leopold who had been an amazing flute player but couldn't play anymore after the First World War, when a bullet to the arm ended his flute-playing. Poor Leopold who had died, who hadn't “survived,” whatever that meant. That was what I knew about Leopold, my namesake.
Later, at some teenage moment that I cannot specify, Germany became much more – a place that my father had not simply left, but barely, and only with his life. A place he had been driven out of. A place that had gone crazy, that had fallen in love with a tyrant named Hitler and had boiled over with hatred for Jews, for what my grandparents were, what my father and mother were, what I was. It was a place where my namesake Leopold had not simply died but been murdered, though nobody seemed to know quite how or where or, more disturbingly, to be trying to find out. It was a place where my father had been chased through a city park by some horrible alternate-reality version of the Boy Scouts called “Hitler Youth” with a noose in their hands, a place where my father told me he might have died if an old man in the park hadn't stepped in and shooed the demented scouts away. It was a place where he had seen a Torah burning in the street, and where his father, my Opa, had been arrested. And yet, even with all that, it was a place that my Oma still professed to love, at least in a pre-war incarnation that she was somehow able to sustain in her mind. It was the place that had been her big happy childhood, a place with a noble language that she wanted me to learn and with complex-sounding sayings that she would recite to me as lessons and then awkwardly translate. How she was able to keep that idyllic place in her mind's eye while fending off images of her little son getting chased by a noose-wielding gang and her husband getting carted off to an awful, guttural-sounding place called “Buchenwald” – and her brother-in-law being murdered – was something I could not fathom.
And then Germany became a place I spent time as a young adult, a nineteen-year-old to be precise, a summer of learning the language in the town where my Opa and my namesake Leopold had grown up. My older brother had spent summers there too and had loved it; he had developed deep friendships and had generally had a blast. I went expecting the same, but for me, things were more complicated. Yes, I met wonderful, kind people, drank too much sweetish wine and crisp beer on a few occasions, and picked up the language quicker than I had any right to. But I was haunted. I was uncomfortable around the elderly: where had they been? What had they done? I would walk past a doorway to a city building and imagine it had just finished echoing with someone's screams. The genuinely lovely man who hosted me stayed up late one night, drunk at the kitchen table, exclaiming in a slurred German I half-understood about how I needed to realize that Germans too had suffered during and after the war and did I understand that he did not see a banana until he was ten years old?
In the office where I worked, a kindly gentleman in his sixties who spoke a beautiful American-sounding English liked to bring his bag lunch to my office and chat. He loved speaking English, he told me, and wanted the chance to practice, to shake off the rust. It wasn't until late in the summer that it occurred to me to ask him how his English had gotten to be so incredibly good. “I lived in Canada for many years after the war,” he told me, and if I'd been a little older and a little wiser that would have been enough to answer further questions, but I was naïve and pressed ahead: “What took you to Canada?” “Well,” he told me, as matter-of-factly as if describing the plot of a movie he'd seen the week before, “I went there to study dentistry, because I wasn't allowed to study dentistry here in Germany because I had been a very active member of the Hitler Youth and as a result that training was forbidden to me.” The Hitler Youth. This kindly older man I had been breaking bread with all summer might have been one of the terror scouts chasing my father with the noose.
I was haunted, and I retreated into ironic distance. I visited Dachau, shed nary a tear, shook my head at the audacity of putting a memorial chapel in a place that God had so clearly abandoned, and mailed my parents a postcard of Dachau's ovens with the message “Germany's beautiful – wish you were here!” scribbled on the back. Ha ha ha.
And now I am back in Germany with a group of law students studying the lawyers and judges of the Third Reich. I am in Berlin, the city I visited in 1972, a city then divided but now made whole. I am here, paradox of paradoxes, as a new German citizen, having recently availed myself (mostly for my daughters' sake) of the country's offer of restored citizenship to those stripped of it during wartime on account of race and religion and to their descendants. Unlike Berlin itself, my perception of Germany is not yet whole, and it probably never will be, but it is closer to whole than it was thirty years ago. I have come to see a Germany that, unbidden by me or anyone in my family, placed a memorial marker to Leopold in the street outside the house from which, in 1942, he was deported to his death in Poland.
I have come to know, at least by email, the woman from Leopold's hometown who recently retraced the steps of his deportation march through the streets of Wuerzburg carrying a sign bearing his name and the date of his exile and the place where he is presumed to have met his bitter and unknown end.
And I am having the pleasure of getting to know one of the law students on this FASPE trip, a young German woman who has the courage to join a trip to Auschwitz to study German atrocities and to deepen our experience by, among other things, talking a little about her own childhood confusion about the holes and silences in her family's story.
This is Germany for me.
Lord only knows what Poland will be.
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