The generalizing gulfs between "Germans" and "Jews" are reinforced in Germany by the omnipresent reminders of the Holocaust. Germany is full of them. I was horrified to discover that in my beloved Freiburg the grassy lot I passed everyday to reach the center of town was in fact a permanent memorial to the synagogue that had stood there until 1938. The street sign "Gurs," which stands in the corner of the lot and points inexplicably in the direction of that French town, is actually a reminder to Freiburgers that their Jewish neighbors had been shipped to a camp there, where most died of exposure and disease.
The survivors were eventually sent to Auschwitz and finished off.
Worse, when I was in Nuremberg, a city that needs
no help being creepy, there was a massive banner wrapped around one of the city's remaining medieval turrets that read in German, "Nuremberg - A City Remembers: 1935-1945." It turned out that this was
the title of a massive show at the municipal museum housed inside the turret. I went, and was confronted with a remarkable collection of photographs, documents, and film that documented the course of Nazism in Nuremberg from the proto-Nazi movement of the early 1920s to its agony and death by American and British hands. Between birth and agony, the ecstasy: a city united and energized by anti-Semitic rage. Sitting in the museum, watching color footage of an anti-Semitic children's carnival on an endless loop, I began to panic. My one thought was, "burn it down." From that day on I have never felt the slightest remorse for Allied bombing campaigns against German cities. Nuremberg deserved it. A nation that sets fire to civilization has no right to complain about its own burns.
While there is an appealing depth to this historical memory, and while I recognize the moral imperative of "never forget," I have at time s wished that we, Germans and Jews, could both agree to forget and just move on. Not because Germans should be "forgiven" or because Germans should be allowed to forget, but because the past should not be allowed to cast such a pall over human relations in the present and the foreseeable future. Gershom Scholem was right that it is too late for a healthy dialogue between Germans and German Jews But it is not too late, for Germans and American Jews to drop the categories and get to know one another as people.
To many people, Jewish people in particular, this smacks of heresy: transgressing Emil Fackenheim's 614th commandment. However, in light of American Jewry's complete amnesia with regard to the other 613 commandments, it is our obsession with the 614th that is heretical. The Holocaust Museum and all others like it are commendable for their educational value for non-Jews, but for Jews they can become a collective Golden Calf. The project they embody has completely and tragically distracted communal leaders and diverted communal resources from the critical task of providing Jews with a positive identity informed by the only things that makes us Jewish: not persecution but Judaism, not Auschwitz but Sinai. Ironically, by rushing to remember the Holocaust at the expense of real Jewish education, all we are doing is handing to Hitler that posthumous victory Fackenheim had warned us about. Every cent spent on teaching and remembering the Holocaust
to Jews is a tribute paid to Hitler, because it comes at the expense of teaching Judaism.
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