Judenstaat

 

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For Harold Gorvine,
l'shem shamayim

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

One morning, I was lying in bed with my husband, and I said, “What if a Jewish state had been established in Germany after the war?”

The very idea was a provocation. Yet I continued to consider: If Theodor Herzl was right when he wrote
Der Judenstaat
in 1896, and the only answer to what he called “the Jewish Question” was a Jewish state, then what if that state had been established as a kind of national project of reparation and even retribution for the Holocaust? How would that shape its history and a politics and national character? I think I speculated out loud for a while—it's that kind of marriage—and then my husband went to brush his teeth, returned, and said, “What about the Soviet Union?”

What about the Soviet Union? It existed. So did Stalin, who might have had his own plans for a Jewish homeland; he had created one called Birobidjan and slaughtered most of its inhabitants in purges. What about East Germany? It didn't exist, or more precisely, this country would encompass much of its territory, though its borders, I decided, would be those of Saxony, east of Berlin. And yes, there's a wall; it keeps out German fascists. The story begins in 1987. The wall is about to fall.

There is no single model for Judenstaat, though a reader will quickly find some parallels: two nations—Israel and East Germany—founded within a year and a half of each other. Both nations claimed to be a response to fascism, a way to move beyond tragedy and to rebuild ruined lives. Judenstaat borrows freely from the trajectory of both countries, with periods of postwar renewal, isolation, suppression, upheaval, and liberalization. A rough timeline appears at the end of this book. As a fortieth anniversary of my country approached, surely it would be time for a historical reckoning.

In constructing what follows, I couldn't help but consider the nature of counterhistories, like Philip K. Dick's
The Man in the High Castle,
a novel that considers what would have happened had Germany and Japan won the Second World War and goes beyond the thought-experiment to look at the fragile nature of history itself. Then I was led, inevitably, to Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
a vision of a future where the past can shift depending on who writes the story.

There is no answer to the Holocaust—or as they say in Yiddish, the Churban. There is no single answer to the Jewish Question. We keep on asking question after question. Perhaps the question that most shaped what you're about to read is not national, but personal: What happens when you lose everything, but have to go on living? Who do you become?

We all know suffering is real. But in the end, all countries are imaginary.

 

Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?

—Thomas Mann,
The Magic Mountain

When you leave a graveside, you mustn't look back.

—S. Ansky,
The Dybbuk

 

A S
PECTER
I
S
H
AUNTING
J
UDIT

 

1

GERMANY
was the birthplace of Jewish culture. A thousand years ago, we planted roots in Ashkenaz that flowered and brought forth the fruit of the Enlightenment embodied by the fabled Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason.

THE CATASTROPHE
—the great
CHURBAN
—which recently befell the Jews of Europe has demonstrated with new urgency that
THE RIGHT OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO A HOME IN GERMANY IS IRREVOCABLE
.

WE DECLARE
that from this moment, the 14th of May 1948, under the establishment of Allied Forces, that the German territory once designated Saxony will henceforth be
JUDENSTAAT
.

PLACING OUR TRUST
in the future, we affix our signatures to this proclamation, and commence with our national project. The very place we faced our death is where we'll build our lives.

Thus, the ghosts of 1948 surface on the editing machine in black and white montage: washed out faces of survivors, signatures on a declaration, flat-bed trucks, a lot of rubble. No audio. Given all the footage Judit had to edit for the Fortieth Anniversary Project, it was easy to roll through the film and make her cuts. And somehow, she was supposed to find something explosively prophetic, something worth keeping. Not this old stuff. The heavy feeder cut and spliced, and the cells floated somewhere else.

But those cells weren't the specter haunting Judit. It was her husband's ghost. That specter stretched its long legs on a work bench, and leaned in to watch her. Its gray eyes were assessing.

Judit said, “I know what I'm doing.” There had been a time when she'd been too self-conscious to address the ghost, but Hans had been haunting her for three years.

The ghost of Hans Klemmer never spoke, but its presence worked on her as sharply as her living husband's. It engaged her in a phantom conversation. It didn't like those cuts; it took a hard line against editing. It noticed things she didn't, like cells littering the floor, and it took stock of those cells as though she were an executioner. Every time she cut a frame, she slit a throat.

“It isn't what they're after,” Judit said. “Everyone's seen the footage of the signing back in secondary school.” How could silence not feel like rebuke? She could only say, “I don't have time for this. I'm on a deadline.”

But Hans was dead. Maybe she could shake off Hans Klemmer's specter like a sinus headache. She kept a box of aspirin in a drawer and took two now. That helped sometimes.

And sometimes not. Why did Hans haunt her in the archive? She never saw the ghost anywhere else. The specter should have haunted the Opera House, where he'd been murdered. It would create a public spectacle. Isn't that what specters are supposed to do? To the extent that one could be rational about a ghost, she found its presence difficult to fathom.

Worse, it kept staring, judging. The living Hans had loved her, and this ghost had her husband's form, but it never touched her. It just stared. Did she want it to go away? It made things difficult. She said, “How can I work when you look at me like that?”

That was Judit's question to answer. After all, she was the archivist. Hans was just history. At least he was now.

*   *   *

They were still naming things after him, the Klemmer Regional Concert Hall, Klemmer Memorial Park, and so on. Because Hans died on Liberation Day, every May 14th he was remembered. Then there was the statue of him by the Opera House, with the wavy hair, the baton, and the flying coattails. The first time Judit saw the ghost, she'd thought it was another statue that someone put in the archive as a joke, but who would hate her that much? Then the statue moved its head and yawned. She'd dropped her coffee.

That was the trouble. There was what some clever historian might call cognitive dissonance between Hans and Hans, between the noble statue and the ghost. And there would always be the statue because of how he'd died, three months after he'd been appointed Judenstaat's first Saxon conductor.

The occasion was momentous. To have this ethnic German—orphaned in '46—raise his baton before the premiere orchestra of the Jewish state in celebration of its liberation by the Soviets, how could it help but feel like one of those ruptures that draws a line between one age and another?

The national anthem sounded new again:

“Risen from ruins and turned towards the future

Let us serve you for the good—”

Then Hans froze. He slumped forward, crumbled into the podium, and fell down with it.

*   *   *

Germans killed him—angry unrepentant Saxon Nazis who marked him for assassination as a collaborator with the Jewish state. Of course a lot of people hated Hans. Judit hadn't been there that night, but she knew hundreds of survivors of the camps had picketed the Opera House when Hans had been appointed. Before the murder, there'd been those phone calls, late at night, with thick, strange silence on the other end. After a while, Judit and Hans had let the phone go on ringing, or Hans would pick up and leave it off the hook under a pillow. Could she remember dates and times? Could she remember if there'd been static on the other end? Or other voices in the background? Why hadn't she and Hans reported those calls to the State Security Police?

Those were the kinds of questions she had to answer during the weeks when she was a public widow, escorted from place to place by a polite Stasi agent who also stood by her bed at night. She was pumped full of so much Valium that there wasn't a clear distinction between days of interrogation, and nights when she would find herself in a nightgown that she didn't recognize, and she told them everything she knew and cursed her own precise and nimble memory for detail that persisted even when she was sedated.