Berlin Cantata (7 page)

In addition, I wished to do my part to help my Israeli brothers find peace in their new land. I attended conferences and sent money. At one such conference on the question of refugees, my heart went out to a young Palestinian. He called me his rose. This may sound at once preposterously kitsch and obvious, but its very simplicity touched me. It was not so much the end of my asceticism as the beginning of a devotion. From the start I knew that Khalil could lie to me. He often did. Yet I was touched by his usual affection, by his periods of “making up,” and by the dispossession he had suffered, both different from and similar to my own, as if we occupied two wings of a triptych separated by a middle that was dark and unintelligible. From the outset my Zionism had been tinctured by the old European dream of a Jewish state that would be a moral beacon to the world's nations. After the war in 1967, I was shocked that Israel did not promptly vacate the various territories it had occupied, and in particular by its claim to keep all of Jerusalem forever. A rift developed between my ideal Zionism and the reality, a rift which I could only partly paper over by remembering that I lived in “safety” in Germany. And so when the Gulf War began in '91 and Israel was under assault by Saddam's missiles and there were legitimate fears of gas attacks, I was already prepared to have my moral sense cleaved. Khalil plied me with reports that, despite Israeli denials, Jews were being issued gas masks while Palestinians in the occupied territories were not. “Thousands will die. It's what they want, to have no Palestinians left.” Despite Khalil's hyperboles, the injustice rankled. The East German state had warehouses full of unused gas masks. Inasmuch as it could be imagined that Israel simply hadn't enough gas masks to go around, I initially tried to broker a deal whereby Israel would grant asylum to a certain high-ranking Stasi man who happened to be Jewish in exchange for the East German gas masks. “Two for one,” I suggested. “You get the ability to live up to your moral responsibility
and
one newly minted Jew.”

Israel refused. Khalil continued to goad me. I finally determined that it would only be just if I took one year's interest from the reparations fund of which I was trustee and with it purchased the East German gas masks for Palestinian use. I had no inkling when I did so that Khalil was playing a double game with me: even while he was urging me to act, he was informing a Berlin reporter of my every action. “For arms, asylum, that is the deal,” “a million gas masks,” “millions of marks.” And so on. He hoped, in effect, to involve me, and Israel, and Israeli-German relations, in a dreadful scandal. He hoped to ruin me, or at the very least he didn't care if he did, if in the bargain he could harm Israel.

You may perhaps see the outlines of a morality tale here, or perhaps a tragic hero's fall. But I warned you at the outset that this was a story about myself. Perhaps, for greater warning, I should have put the word “story” in italics. The reason being that certain all-important portions of this story I've told – comforting received wisdom though they had become to many – are just that: a story. I am referring to my so-called “war record,” my actions in an underground Jewish resistance in Berlin during the war, my heroic, or whatever you would say, murder of an SS officer. Lies. All lies. Or if you will, perhaps, the only genuinely literary act of Franz Rosen's career. I spent the war in cowering terror in a coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg, afraid in nearly equal parts of being exposed and being bombed. The only sex I had was with a haberdasher who owned the building. He was a Nazi for sure, but the only secret information he held was his sexuality. I suppose that my “underground” fantasy started with nothing more than the basement I found myself in. I could go no lower in life than I found myself, but I could fly on wings of imagination. Is it possible for a lie to begin in metaphor? I imagined the underground of which I would be a gallant queer part, I imagined each of my Nazi lovers and the secrets they would divulge, I imagined how I would kill when I had to. These were even fantasies that I elaborated in acts of love with the haberdasher, who excited my pity and contempt. And of course in the war's aftermath there were those with complementary desires, those who wished to believe in Jews in underground activities here – so it was a convenient lie as well. No one, finally, had the heart to check it out too carefully. I wish I could say that the war had made me a killer. But it had made me a liar.

And it had done one thing more: it had exposed to my unavoidable stare my sexuality. Previous to the war I had had sexual liaisons, but with women, prostitutes chiefly, apparently in order to prove to myself my masculinity, to overcome a terror of the vagina which at the time I took to be ordinary and inevitable. My first inklings that things might be otherwise came in my affection for my brother's friends, who were hearty, athletic types, exemplars, really, despite being Jewish, of the estheticized, sexualized public sphere which the Nazis created, in which bodies and athleticism were worshipped. But these secret affections led me nowhere. It took the coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg to make things clear to me. My haberdasher was a brute, but astute enough, in his sexual instincts if little else. He spoke to me often about the mistreatment of the Jews being taken too far, as if to remind me how lucky I was and to persuade me of his compassion on which I depended. That compassion, however, he extended only to certain sorts of Jews, the artistic, the philosophers, the heirs to Heine as it were, not to the stock exchange Jews whom he blamed for the troubles of all of us; these feelings being in truth not far from ones I'd felt myself when I was young. He was conscripted to the
Volkssturm
in February of the war's last year. I have no idea what became of him.

Now came the Gulf War and my betrayal of my trust and Khalil's betrayal of me and the entry into my life of Nils Schreiber, the reporter from our city's progressive daily to whom Khalil confided and who became my relentless Javert. I have nothing but favorable reviews to offer of Nils Schreiber. More in point, I fell in love with him, at an age when I had felt I was almost beyond that possibility. He seemed so superior to Khalil in every particular, moral, emotional, physical, even I would say his height, his eyes, his voice, that I began to wonder if I was seeing in myself some late-blooming racism. Not that I ever had the remotest hint of an affair with Nils Schreiber. He was surely an active and satisfied heterosexual, involved for a considerable period with a pretty American girl. Rather, I loved him at a distance which decreased while my love grew, as a fox might love an able hound. Finally he had all the pieces in place. He cornered me in a beach cottage in Sicily to which I had fled. I was not displeased to see him. Other than in social settings, it was the first time we had met. I complimented him on the many pieces of his which I had read with pleasure over the years. Many of these had dealt with his favorite issue and perhaps on occasion mine as well, the fate of the Jew in Germany. I offered him tea and a local liqueur, but he chose only the tea. We discussed also his friend David Fürst, who had the
chutzpah
– I suppose this is a not inappropriate use of that tired phrase – to have taken a coterie of rightwing hotheads under his wing. Only at length did we get down to the business which had brought Nils to me. He had his article and was ready to publish. I read it over while he sipped his tea. The details were correct as far as they went, which is to say, they showed no inkling of the lies of my “war record”; the entire tenor of the piece was rather of the hero of the Nazi-time who had a taken a fall from grace.

Now by this time events had rather mitigated my crime. To protect his own reputation, Herbert Kaminski had reimbursed the reparation fund for whatever shortfall was involved. Because the war was over so quickly, the gas masks themselves still sat in a Berlin warehouse. With currency fluctuations, they had actually increased modestly in value. I had earned the Fund in the neighborhood of five percent by my “speculation in commodities,” and Herbert would be promptly repaid. Nils had discovered these facts, and they appeared in his article, but they did lead me to wonder what kind of scoop this reporter was left with.

“Does the piece have real news interest?” I asked, more out of a compulsive editorial motive than for self-protection.

“I think so,” he said, his earnest gray eyes watching perhaps for my flinch. “The news interest is you. Your character. Why someone with a sterling reputation would risk all of it, even cheat, for a moral cause that nonetheless could be easily challenged.”

“And your answer is…Khalil? But if that's the answer, I'm quite the dupe, am I not? It's what your article must inevitably imply.”

“He does seem, let's say, unworthy of you.”

“Well I assure you, Khalil has some very decent qualities. When he wishes to be, he can be warm and sincere. He appears to adore his new wife and family. He detests homosexuals, a fact which he's often conveyed to me, along with the assurance that he's not one himself.”

“Then, why?”

“You see, Mr. Schreiber, I don't wish to be humiliated. I may deserve to be humiliated, and so that part of me, that recognizes my worthiness for it, of course demands it. But at the same time I wish to be saved from it.”

“I don't follow.”

“No. Of course.”

“You wish me to humiliate you? But that's not the article's intention. It perhaps even shows you in a flattering light.”

We were on my terrace, on a cloudy day, with a view to the gray sea. So far away from my only real home, I suddenly felt lucky to have been found, like a runaway who will soon be taken back to the rude shelter he has always known, and who feels, despite the cruelties he may have experienced there, that it is the one place that knows him well. I sipped my own tea and decided to tell Nils Schreiber: “More importantly, Mr. Schreiber…you see, I am a fraud. The great Franz Rosen, one of the fairies who slept with the Nazis for the underground…all false.” I then supplied him with the various details, the coal bin, the haberdasher, my fear, my lies. “Now
that
would be a scoop, wouldn't it, Mr. Schreiber? To replace the one that fell rather flat? I suppose you'll be smart enough, I suppose I'll not have to connect every dot of my shame. But…a man may wish to act once in his life with the moral courage on which he's dined for forty years.”

My words had their desired effect: tears in the gray eyes of this thoughtful man. It was as though, if you'll pardon me, the sea beyond us was reflected there.

At length I asked him if he thought, when his article appeared, that I could be charged with some sort of crime. He thought most certainly not. I insisted we drink to that, and got out a bottle of wine. He raised his glass but it was I who made something of a toast: “Be sure to write – I think this is good, perhaps – a small part of the guilt money the Germans gave the Jews, a Jew gave the Arabs. Or rather, tried to… You know when people are most easily made fools of, don't you? When they wish to be the hero.”

SIMONA JASTROW

Confusion

WHEN I WAS BORN
, and where I was born, divorce was rare. Nonetheless my parents seemed to manage it. It was the time of the yellow star and of being booted out of everywhere. You would have thought it was a time for sticking together. But no. I was too little at the time to understand all – I was nine – but what it seemed like, and from what they said, which was contradictory and not really to be believed, even by me, my mother wished to emigrate and my father didn't, then subsequently my father wished to emigrate but not with my mother. This emigration business never seemed the whole story. Then my father, who always talked about the Socialists, said to us that the Soviet Union was our only hope. My mother thought this was crazy. Later she would say it was his way to get rid of her. My father said
that
was crazy. He went to the Ukraine and worked on a collective farm. My mother obtained passage for her and myself to Shanghai. We had little money left but we made it. Our life in Shanghai was not at all full of the fun and games that some authors have described. Afterwards we emigrated to Vancouver, B.C., where my mother married a high school principal. I grew up and found Vancouver and all of it, my mother's life, our life, repulsively bourgeois. Shortly after the GDR's founding, I myself moved back to Berlin, convinced of the need to build Communism in the land of its invention. My father, I learned, had fought in the Red Army and survived the war. We resumed an occasional awkward communication by letter. He had other children by now and what I took, sight unseen, to be a shrewish, fat Russian wife.

My ardor for my new/old country was enhanced by being flattered. The fact that I'd come back from North America seemed to increase the stock that various higher-ups in the regime placed in me. I was installed on a journal. I was considered reliable. I was encouraged to write my own story. And in most aspects I was indeed reliable. I believed in equality. I believed we were besieged. I believed that Zionism was an inauthentic, doomed reaction to circumstances which late capitalism brought about and that West Germany exclusively, not the East at all, deserved to inherit the guilt for the war and the slaughter of all, Jews included. I was not blind to the seams of the GDR, but each time I observed them, I discounted, and explained, and recommitted myself. The hypocrisy could be discounted, for instance, by the supposed greater hypocrisy of the West. The corruption could be explained by the corrosive effects of the Western conspiracies to undermine us. The regime's harshness was necessary because our enemies were real and strong and ubiquitous, and only when they let up could we afford to relax our vigilance. I embraced such opinions until the end, that is, at which point, deprived of the lying, autocratic structures of authority which supported them, my beliefs – already straining, as I've indicated – collapsed utterly. This is not a flattering picture of myself, but it accurately describes the self-loathing around which my disillusionment wrapped itself. By 1991, I had been living for eight years at the East German Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee, not far from Potsdam. I was supposed finally to be putting to paper my autobiography, but I was paralyzed by my disillusionment. Why had I come to the GDR at all? My old explanations seemed as convenient and lying as everything else. By any account, it had been an unlikely journey. I felt the waste of my life. But who could I blame? It was then I met Electra Papaiannis, through the suggestion of a former colleague of mine in the Writers Union to whom I had confided my despair. Electra was a plump woman who favored loose clothing and heavy jewelry. She gave the immediate impression of being a Roma, which was of course reinforced the moment you learned of her profession. Electra conducted séances. Of course she was not a Roma, she was a Greek whose father had landed in a Düsseldorf restaurant decades previous. I had the vaguest ideas, from certain absurd films and articles, what a séance was. But I had lost both my parents in recent years, after decades of the faintest contact, and along with all else that had gone wrong, I missed them. Electra proposed to me that she might be able to help me. Now if you had told Simona Jastrow the devoted Socialist that a Greek woman in a shapeless dress could put her in touch with her dead parents, she might have written little notes to the proper people about all of you. But I was no longer that Simona Jastrow. I was Simona Jastrow who was devoted to nothing, who had nothing, who was lost. Here you see my vulnerability, here you see how doubters could attack me. But I freely admit it all. I had nothing to lose. This is when people do everything worthwhile in their lives.