Fifty years have passed since I sat talking to a bespectacled young man in a café on Berlin’s Kurfürstendam. I was in the city to talk of Faulkner’s America at the urging of my friend Heinz Scheer. Long before he had settled into his role at the Amerika Haus in Freiburg, Heinz had served as a sixteen-year-old soldier with the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. He had been visiting in New York when, at lunch on a spring afternoon six months before I was to leave for the Netherlands for a second Fulbright year, I suddenly began to savage Germans for the murders of those uncles, aunts, and cousins whom I knew only as stiff, brown photographs clinging like moss to a mountain wall in the apartment I lived in as a child. Heinz listened silently until I finished. Then he said, “Come meet our young people.” I shrugged, then grudgingly nodded. A bargain had been struck.
I arrived in the Netherlands three days before Russian tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968. As promised, Heinz had arranged a series of lectures for me over the next nine months at a number of German universities. And as he suspected, German students impressed me. Unlike my passive Dutch students, for whom politics seemed a mere matter of fashion, the Germans seemed to be struggling to understand the importance of the choices they were being asked to make—perhaps because their nation stood at the heart of the Cold War.
The last of the lecture stops Heinz arranged for me was Berlin, where I was escorted through the city by that bespectacled young man. Over coffee and strudel, we were discussing the effects of the Wall on life in Berlin, until, from out of nowhere, he began to speak of how pained he was by the absence of those who had served as the cultural heart of Berlin. It took some time before I realized that he was speaking of the Jews. The anguish in his voice was genuine—unlike my bizarre experience a month earlier, where at a student party in a dingy candlelit room in Freiburg I was greeted by a scratchy recording of Sophie Tucker singing My Yiddishe Momme as a young man with a wispy goatee and thinning blond hair handed me a glass of wine and said, “We young people love Yiddish.” After that, I was quite willing to embrace the Jewish ghosts of Berlin.
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