In Berlin, Dancing to the Music of Death

Of all cities, what was I doing in Berlin early this summer—Berlin, the city my mother had providentially left for London in 1932 and where, thirteen years later, the Haman to end all Hamans was routed along with his cronies?

That the Germans should have been behind an attempt to eradicate the Jewish people throughout Europe always seemed to me unsurprising. I had read much about their almost uniquely successful resistance in antiquity to the encroachment of Rome and its classical civilization, about the subsequent invasion and devastation of the western Roman empire by Germanic tribes, and about, in medieval times, the violent attacks on Jewish communities in the Rhineland as a kind of hors d’oeuvre to the First Crusade. To me the German people had always been the devil’s Middle-European representative, their presence a shadow casting a gloom over the more enlightened peoples around them.

Of course, I had always known that there was another, good Germany, one that actually revered and did much to sustain the literature and history of the great classical civilization it had once so successfully fought, conquered, and then absorbed. I knew this because of my mother. Born in Amsterdam, and English on her mother’s side, she had spent her early childhood in Berlin where her father, a Polish-born journalist, was pursuing his career at the Berliner Tageblatt. To this day, sometimes to the accompaniment of tears, she laments being forced to leave, and I don’t think I have ever heard her say a word against the people whose music and literature gave her such delight.