Berlin's Holocaust memorials and museums produce a tangle of emotions

BERLIN — Browsing in a hip houseware imports store in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, I heard a familiar melody on the stereo.

Could it be? Yes. The "Oseh Shalom." The last lines of the Mourner's Kaddish, an ancient Jewish prayer for the dead and for peace, set to a plaintive refrain and playing softly, in the neighborhood of a city where tens of thousands of German Jews once resided, worshiped and were carted off to death camps.

Sixty years after World War II ended, to the store manager I spoke to it was just another track of ethnic background music to shop by. But for this American Jewish traveler, it was one symbolic, ironic encounter among many with today's Jewish-centric Berlin.

On a recent trip to Berlin (my first), I often felt history clashing with modernity, grief suddenly engulfing me and moments of puzzlement and even comic absurdity.

Holocaust reminders, markers, monuments, museums and memorials are everywhere in this vibrant, self-aware city. And I often didn't know whether to laugh, to rage or to weep when encountering them.

Such ambivalence is not rare for foreign Jewish visitors to contemporary Berlin.

The current generation of German leaders is the first to make a vigorous, laudable commitment to publicly expose and repudiate the barbarism of Nazi Germany, particularly the regime's annihilation of 6 million European Jews.

These projects are not undertaken lightly. Often, they are the subjects of fierce public debate.

But what are they? Heartfelt apologies to the Jews of the world, expressing what German Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse called "the acceptance of responsibility for our history"?

Or "Never again!" reminders to young people, to instill religious and ethnic tolerance and refute neo-Nazis and Holocaust debunkers? Gestures to burnish modern Germany's image, still scarred by its fascist past?

I cannot untangle a single answer. Nor can I tell you what I expected or hoped for from these shrines. My feelings became clearer only as I frequently confronted reminders of Berlin's unquiet Jewish and Nazi ghosts — confrontations I found fascinating and excruciating, meaningful and disappointing.

The most massive, central and official of the monuments are major tourist attractions of reunified Berlin: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate (which opened in May) and the new Jewish Museum Berlin (completed in 2002).

Also prominent: the Topography of Evil, a harrowing, open-air exhibit on the perimeter of the site where the headquarters of the SS (Nazi special police) once stood. A museum is being built there, to house the detailed blueprints for genocide unearthed from the razed building's bunkers.

Berlin synagogues, once desecrated by the Nazis and now restored (with protective anti-terrorism edifices, ironically), are now open to tourists and to Berlin's current and surprisingly large Jewish population — composed mostly of 1990s émigrés from the former Soviet Union.

There also are many more modest, intimate places of remembrance — like the "mirror wall," which lists the names and addresses of 1,723 Jews from the Steglitz district who were Nazi victims.

Jewish "vogue"

Curiously, there also are signs of Berlin's general vogue for many things Jewish: Klezmer bands, delis serving bagels, specialty bookstores. Berlin writer Iris Weiss caustically labeled this phenomenon "Jewish Disneyland" — a sentimental craze for "exotic" cultural trappings related more to Eastern European Jewish culture than the highly assimilated, pre-Hitler Jews of Germany.

How one responds to all this is partly a matter of background. In my case, my immediate family escaped the Holocaust (though not other forms of anti-Semitism), by coming to the United States from Poland and Russia two decades before Hitler seized power in 1933.

But the Holocaust was painfully real to me as a child. "Never forget!" was the motto of my parents' generation. And from unsparing films, books, religious lessons and testimony from camp survivors, I learned enough to give me dreadful nightmares of Dachau and Auschwitz.

My young mind strained to imagine how any nation could coldly plan, and largely accomplish, the systematic annihilation of an entire people. My people. I still cannot truly comprehend it — who can?

I was hoping to find some insight, or at least a sense of catharsis, at Berlin's Memorial to the Slaughtered Jews of Europe. A sunken grove of more than 2,700 ashen cement slabs, this giant civic monument was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, who says it resembles a "waving cornfield." Not to my eyes: From above, and within, it seemed a bleak, anonymous graveyard.

Drearily abstract, the piece bears no names or other words along its rows of pillars. Nor does it identify the off-kilter alleys one walks through between the tall slabs, as paths Jews may have taken — in life, or to their deaths.

Two decades of national debate, at a cost of 27 million euros to the German government, and this was the result? No wonder the design (chosen among 25 submitted) was so controversial. And how grotesquely ironic that the project faced further troubles when it was learned that Degussa, the company supplying graffiti-proof coating for the posts, had ties to a firm that made Zyklon B — the gas used to exterminate Jews in the camps. (A different supplier was found.)

My difficulty with this grim eyesore was more visceral and immediate: It left me cold. An enthused guide explained how the memorial allows each visitor a contemplative, singular experience, its irregular paths creating the symbolic illusion that those around you are disappearing in a dark maze.

But German Jews didn't evaporate: Roughly 160,000 to 165,000, by estimates, were worked to death, or slaughtered. This concept of absence, instead of an inescapable collision with life and loss, began to enrage me, as a head-game that bypasses the heart.

No wonder some children have been jumping from pillar to pillar. What would make them think this structure wasn't a playground?

I hoped the memorial's underground museum, with its mission to personalize Jewish suffering through victims' letters, diary excerpts, photographs and family biographies, would be more compelling.

But despite the sleekly displayed photos, the anguished written pleas of the murdered, the wall-projected tallies of Jewish dead from each country, something was missing.

I got an idea of what it was from a recurring phrase in the exhibit notes: "... the National Socialists (Nazis) and those who assisted them."

Who were these "assistants," I wondered? The Nazi reign lasted 12 years. What were the masses of ordinary Germans thinking, feeling, doing when their Jewish co-workers and neighbors fled the country in the early 1930s or were forcibly ejected from their homes and deported?

Where was a display about the roots and extent of German anti-Semitism? If this chilly, cerebral memorial wasn't going to engage the heart, couldn't it at least ponder how a society resists or acquiesces to genocidal brutality?

Maybe such memorials are really not for most Jews, as our guide implied, but for those who know little of Holocaust history. So what did I want from them?

Frustration dogged me as I visited Berlin's Jewish Museum, which a German academic had annoyingly assured me wasn't another Holocaust "guilt trip" but a tribute to centuries of German Jewish culture.

Poignant memories

My skepticism was quickly shattered, though, by the building itself. Brilliantly designed by American architect Daniel Libeskind (also slated to create a Ground Zero memorial in New York), it is a remarkably dramatic expression of a history interrupted, with its odd angles, scarlike zigzagging window slashes and eerie internal voids (empty towers).

The historical exhibits within have won less applause than the structure itself. But they are colorful, informative and often high-tech/interactive enough to engage youths.

A lengthy narrative guides you from the first documentation of Jews in Germany (a decree by Roman emperor Constantine in 321) to the present, via exhibits of manuscripts, paintings, ritual objects, video and audio clips, and (predictably) homages to Jewish German "all stars" — from poet Heinrich Heine to scientist Albert Einstein to movie director Billy Wilder.

But along this time continuum, the ebb and flow of German persecution of Jews is also apparent, through pogroms, special taxes, restrictions on land ownership and profession. And yellow identity patches — 400 years before Hitler decreed all Jews would wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes.

However, the most poignant exhibit was a temporary art installation in the only one of the museum's "voids" that is occupied.

"Shalechet (Fallen Leaves)," by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, consists of 10,000 iron-wrought, open-mouthed "faces" spread across the floor. You can walk on this metallic carpet, a disconcerting, heart-wrenching act of communion. I felt as if I was literally tramping on the faces of the dead (the piece is dedicated to all victims of persecution), as the clanging of "faces" under my feet echoed into the room's lofty reaches.

Also rewarding, if painful, was a display of rather mundane objects in the museum's small Holocaust section. I was especially struck by a Berliner's neatly typed note, informing Nazi authorities that his neighbor was aiding desperate Jews with illegal food rations and forged passports. The "hidden history" of individual depravity, and moral courage — it was all there on a scrap of paper.

But the memorial in Berlin that moved me most was even smaller, even less conspicuous.

I first came upon the stolper steine (stumble stones) while walking near the Sophienstrasse, an artsy area of boutiques, galleries and cafes.

Suddenly a glint of brass on the sidewalk caught my eye. It was a small, embedded plate, bearing words and numbers — the names, birth and death dates of Jews who had once lived at this address, and the names of the concentration camps where they perished. One person listed was a toddler at her death, another perhaps her elderly grandmother.

These 4x4-inch brass cobbles turned out to be the work of Cologne artist Gunter Demnig, who has researched and installed more than 3,600 of them in 45 German cities. The stones memorialize not only Jews, but also some of the millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazi genocide — homosexuals, trade unionists, the disabled.

The cobbles cost $100 each, but were more precious to me than gold. They say quietly: "There were human beings living here, with names and loved ones. Please remember what happened to them, and should happen to no one."

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," has said of Germany's willingness to face its past, "This is how we move forward; this is how we really show that we are no longer complicit morally, intellectually in any way in those deeds."

More than anything else on my trip, the stumble stones made real to me the lost Jews of Berlin — and the righteous impulse to honor them.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com