I Sleep in Hitler's Room (9 page)

I jog into a church, to learn more.

“You have a Jew accent,” Manfred says to me as I arrive at the church’s
Gute Nacht
(good night) Café, exactly at closing time. I get ready to leave but the fine people here won’t let a Heaven Seeker disappear into the night. I’m given a slice of cake with fresh coffee, and Manfred sits down to talk with me.

He met some Jews from the Jewish state, he informs me, and I share an accent with them. Am I a Jew?

No, I am Polish. Today I decide to be Polish. I had enough of being Jordanian, enough of being German. I need a Change. Like Barack Obama.

Manfred: “O, God. The Israelis are quite aggressive. They close down the border so that other people don’t get food, they starve the Palestinians of Gaza, they’re very engaged militarily. They don’t want peace, they want war.”

Nicely put, but there’s a little problem here: Gaza is sandwiched between Israel and Egypt. While the Israelis allow passage of some food and medicine into Gaza, the Egyptians do not allow anything through and keep their border with Gaza hermetically closed.

Does it bother you that Egypt closes the border even more than the Israelis do?

“I don’t know why the Egyptians do it, so I can’t make a judgment.”

But, of course, he knows The Jews.

Maybe he even knows I’m no Pole. I feel exposed. I sit here, eating this delicious cake in Munich, while I starve the Palestinians in Gaza. Horrible man I am. I’ll get no heaven. I won’t sit next to Ms. Ritz up there. Horrible, horrible, horrible. A horrible Jew, that’s all that I am. Tomorrow I’ll go to confession.

But on the day of morrow, cruel man that I am, I walk immediately into an exhibition tent called Oasis of Temptation. Where else! My temptation source for today is an attractive lady by the name of Sister Jutta-Maria. A Smiling Nun. She had a boyfriend for two years and then decided she wanted more from the relationship, but the only way she could get it, she thought, was by marrying Jesus. That’s Christ, Jesus Christ. She’s five years a sister, and she’s getting close to Jesus. In three years, that’s the plan now, she will marry Him.

How does Jesus look?

“He’s not Italian. He has a short beard and brown hair.”

Is he a good kisser?

“Are you Catholic or Protestant?” She asks in reply.

Me? Protestant! American Protestant from New York.

No Jew, no Pole, no Jordanian, no German. I can’t believe I change my identity so often. Psychiatrists would say that I suffer from Arrested Development or something related. But I just like it. I was given one life to live, and I want many more. You can try it too, it’s very uplifting.

Is Jesus a good kisser?

Here Sister gets more cautious. “He’s not a, a, not a—”

Not what?

“You know, not a, how do you say it in English? I don’t know. He is not a, you know.”

Well, let’s try to figure it out.

How will it happen? I ask her. Will Jesus come to your room in the cloister at night and say, “Hello, Sister Jutta. Here I am!”

“Jutta-Maria!” she corrects me. Her birth name is Jutta, true, but the Virgin appeared to her and told her that “she wanted to hear her name out loud every time people call me.” So, she smiles, “I added the name Maria.”

Good. Now, let’s try to imagine the Courtship Scene: Jesus will come to your room in the cloister at night and say, “Hello, Sister Jutta-Maria. Here I am!” What will you do?

First, she tells me, she’s going to check it out, make sure it’s Him. Her father is a policeman and she’s not just trusting everybody.

“Are you tempted?” she says, changing the subject.

Is she “starting” with me, does she want me to take her to my Ritz bedroom? No, no. She offers me chips. Chips, she says, are very tempting. She used to have two packs a week before she fell in love with Jesus. But today she craves it only once every two months. She lives in a cloister, and when temptation calls she goes to the Head Sis and tells her of the problem. And the Head Sister says, “I am happy to give you chips.” But not always. Sometimes there are no chips. Stuff happens. Jutta-Maria offers me chocolate, which is Temptation number 2. That’s the way she sees it.

I say, Thank you, I’ll conquer Temptation today!

She looks at the Head Sister, sitting nearby, and asks if she could have the chocolate later.

Yes!

Sr. Jutta-Maria now explains some Hebrew to her American Protestant visitor.

“
Maria
,” she says, “means
beloved of God
in Hebrew.”

This American Protestant is very happy to study Judaism and Hebrew in Munich.

My journey into Germany ends up being a journey into Judaism.

Life is full of surprises!

Manfred should have seen how I conquered Temptation. He’d be proud of this Pole.

I’m in Munich’s “
Messe
,” which is a big convention center. This is one of the locations where thousands of German Christians, Catholic and Protestant, are attempting to get a bit closer.

Margot Kassman gives a speech a few feet away. Dressed in black, she reads her speech from prepared pages. The audience repeatedly applauds. Journalists and photojournalists mix in the crowd. Lots of media here. Some of the photojournalists take pix of other photojournalists.

She doesn’t strike me as a charismatic person, but the folks here seem to be her followers. I know very little about her. She used to be a bishop or something and resigned after she was caught driving while “intoxicated,” as they say in New York. I wonder what my Half and Half of Hamburg thinks of her! I can see him in his office, on the sixth floor of the
Die Zeit
building, laughing for hours!

It took Margot a lifetime to be given a bishopric, and a glass of wine or a mug of beer to lose it.

Come hither, Giovanni, and we’ll walk the streets of Munich together, laughing until this city explodes!

At Margot’s side, at a table just behind her, a bishop sits. A Greek Orthodox by the name of Constantin Miron, if I got his name right. He has a long beard, a big belly, and a ponytail. He picks his nose, looks around, and picks his nose again. She talks about the good all religions give to people, or something to that effect, and the Greek picks his nose. If I get her right, she says that we can all have hope if we don’t bow down to the rules of the media— and the multitude of photojournalists click. Applause. Music. End. Very PC. The audience goes wild. Germans, it seems, like their leaders noncharismatic. Dry, passionless leaders drive the German soul and psyche to ever greater heights. The audience, Margot’s followers, approach the podium with their digital cameras. They push and they shove. They want to take pix. Pix of the living God.

More and more of them are coming.

She gets off the podium, a short woman in black, and the multitude follow.

Something like a stampede develops. The people just can’t say goodbye. They want more of her. And more. And more. To be near. One more pic. One more autograph. They beg to be near. They don’t know yet on which side of Jesus they’ll sit up there, but they know on which side of Margot they stand down here. They push their digital cameras on top of one another. Here’s one offering a scarf to be signed. Margot apparently loves all nations and all religions, and graciously accepts the admiration of all.

Where is the nose-picking Greek guy? He’s gone. He disappeared; no one even noticed. It’s just Margot, the admirers, and the scarf. A Trinity. I stand next to her, amazed by the crowd. One day, who knows, this scarf will be exhibited in a place called Turin-2, and millions will come to see the miracles of the scarf. And I, from my place in heaven, to the right of Ms. Ritz, will smile and say to the Lübeck woman who sits to the left of Jesus: I saw it when it all started, with my own eyes!

Only now, still on earth, I have to deal with an old lady here who has just stepped on my foot. Small price to pay for witnessing a big miracle in the making.

As I write this, and I’m getting used to it already, people stop next to me to look at my iPad, a device not yet available in Germany. They are friendly. They ask if they could watch me writing on it, and they would like to know some more details, if I don’t mind their asking. None of these people, I am impressed, is thinking of this iPad in terms of “Let me play Games on it.” No. They wonder, and truly admire, the technology they think is in it. I look at them, and the thought comes to my mind: I admire their admiration. I don’t know of any other culture where its people are so excited about technology.

I remember the Apple Store in New York just a few weeks ago, when the iPad was first released. There were tremendously long lines outside the store. Inside, it felt like a sardine can. Everybody wanted to touch the iPad. And the moment the people-sardines got it into their hands, they played different games on it. The excitement was about the games. But this is not the attitude of the people here, these Germans. They want to know the technical stuff. No one asks me what games could I play on it. Here they ask questions like: Were you really typing on it? Is it easy? You can create files, not just . . . Can I see the keyboard? Can you write long documents as well? And then send them via email? Is it better than a computer?

Funny, but this is the thing that most impresses me at this
Kirchentag
. No, they are not like this only here. Same in Hamburg, same in Autostadt. Only that here I have groups of people stopping to watch this wonder in my hands. Amazing, these Germans. I am impressed. They yearn to learn, and I love my new teaching position.

Every human excitement has a limit, as you probably know, and, after a day full of spirituality for my soul, my stomach begs for a little attention as well.

I leave the
Messe
and go to the city. Right next to a very nice-looking church by the name of Frauenkirche, the Andechser am Dom restaurant smiles at me. I’m going to eat here.

Reiner, a Catholic man who sits across from me at the same table, shares his thoughts about the
Kirchentag
. He thinks it’s good that the Catholics and the Protestants talk to each other, but nothing will change on the ground as long as the Catholic Church believes itself to be the only true church. No, he doesn’t recommend that the Catholic Church change its view. If it did, the Church would dissolve. And then he says this long German word:
Alleinvertretungsanspruch
, which means in English: the “Only True Church.” You wouldn’t know what it means unless you’re Catholic, or about to be. But it sounds nice in German in any case, doesn’t it? I like it.

A very friendly blond comes over. She’s the waitress. What would I like to eat? Well, what does she think is good? I’m in the mood to eat good food. We settle on a schnitzel. She smiles, I smile, she cracks a joke, I crack a joke, and Reiner is busy talking. Reiner thinks that Obama is the best American president ever since Roosevelt.

Why does he think that Obama is so good?

Well, Reiner is personally very impressed by Obama. For a black man, Reiner says, Obama is outstandingly smart. Obama, says Reiner, can talk for an hour and make no mistakes! That’s an amazing thing for Reiner to digest, a black man who can perform like this! Obama fired the executives of Goldman Sachs, Reiner adds, and that was good. Reiner is against capitalists worldwide, and against wars as well. Obama wants to get out of Afghanistan, and that’s good. Obama’s Middle East policy is not good yet, because he can’t do much due to “strong pressure from the American press, which is Jewish, and also because of the pressures from American financial institutions and American economists who are also Jewish.” Can he name one American financial institution that pressures Obama on behalf of the Jews? Yes, Goldman Sachs. Lehman Brothers, by the way, was founded by American Jews from Germany.

It’s interesting for me to hear because, frankly, I wasn’t aware that I was so rich. I didn’t know I owned so many financial institutions. When I’m back in New York I’m going to attend all the board meetings at Goldman Sachs. I’ll also have to hire a financial advisor to handle all my media holdings.

Reiner is much smarter than me. He knows everything he owns: five hundred acres of land in a place called Ammersee.

Reiner is a true scholar. He knows not only about Jews but about women as well. Austrian women are preferable to Germans. The German women, he advises me, are emancipated—which is a minus. But don’t misunderstand him: Those Austrian beauties are no dumb babes. They seem obedient but they know how to wrap their naïve husbands around their little obeying Austrian fingers!

Beware!

The schnitzel arrives. I taste it. It’s excellent. Between you and me, I don’t really care what Germans think about Jews. As long as I can enjoy their schnitzels, may they be blessed.