Walls. Sometimes it seems that walls get a bad rep, criticized for their opacity, rigidness and divisiveness. Walls, however, are merely shape-givers. And shape is a pretty important for defining how we understand the world, ie, whatever we are giving shape to.
Twenty one years ago today the Berlin Wall came down. It was a high wall, made of cement, patrolled by armed guards ordered to shoot anyone and anything that tried to cross it without permission. On the day the wall came down, thousands of people came together, a nation was reunited, and those same guards put their guns down and hugged the people from the other side, who only hours before had been enemies. It was a great day for Germany, and a pretty great day for the world, continuing a movement towards unification of Germany (and truthfully Europe), and democratization of the former communist East.
Seventy two years ago a lot of other walls came down in Germany. Not only walls, but also windows, roofs, and doors of Jewish-owned stores, homes and synagogues.
Of course Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall don´t really have anything in common besides a few abstract elements: the physically destructive manifestation of a burgeoning socio-political movement, a region, and a day of the year.
I suppose I could and maybe should go on to tell you some interesting facts about both events, why and how they are still relevant today, but I think there are plenty of articles and blogs out there that will do just that, so I think instead I will give you a bit of an update on my life in Germany, and what this day means in relation to it.
Last Thursday I attended my first ever Rabbinical Ordination. It was located at the Pestalozzi synagogue, a building for which today is certainly significant. This building was damaged in Kristallnacht, restored after WWII, and became the primary synagogue for the Jewish community that lived in West Berlin. Today it remains one of eight active congregations in Berlin and is home to a liberal congregation. On Thursday it was the site of the third class of Rabbinical ordinations in Germany by the Abraham Geiger Kolleg since WW2, and the first ordination of a female Rabbi in Germany since the first female Rabbi ever to be ordained in the world, Regina Jonas, who was later murdered at Auschwitz.
Thursday´s ordination was a pretty intense, but certainly joyous, event, and it was also the first of two times this week that I head the German president Christian Wulff speak. Events like this are strange reminders than Jewish life in Germany is, in its own way, thriving, developing, and self sustaining, BUT, completely and at times overwhelmingly characterized by the extraordinariness of its own existence. AKA, as wonderful as a rabbinical ordination always is, as momentous as this particular ordination is, it certainly makes you wonder, will normal Jewish life in Germany ever be considered "normal" enough that the community´s activities are not front page news, worthy of a presidential speech? I don´t know. I think a lot of people in Germany quite innocently, and well-intentionally ask themselves this question. I guess at this point it feels pretty incredible that Germany as a country and German Jews as a community within that country, have come so far in their relationship to one another that both can sort of make the agreement to let Jewish German achievement be part of a political, social and cultural conversation, and to allow these types of events to take place on a public stage.
Hmm, there is no question that World War II and the Holocaust play a huge part in my work here, not to mention my sense of self awareness as a Jew and also as an American in Germany, but I am not sure quite yet how I want to approach these issues for my project or here, with you, in this type of a forum. I am not sure I know exactly how to form an opinion about a subject that I am confronted with almost everyday, but that I don´t honestly feel I have a right to take a stance on (personally or academically).
And so, when surrounded by the shapeless cloud of the past that sometimes seems to hover over modern Germany, I guess I am learning to study how putting walls back up, might actually be a really useful sort of public therapy and community awareness program.
In the last few weeks I have documented over 70 buildings around Germany that have been restored in some way in the last forty years to reflect their original architecture as synagogues. As my project is developing I am considering focusing mostly on restoration projects in the new German states, those that joined the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expensive, labor intensive restoration projects in former East Germany have been taking place for the last few years quite frequently, despite a weaker economy than the West, shrinking populations, and severe brain drain. So, while it might seem logical to classify these projects (and any Jewish or Holocaust memorial projects in Germany) as some sort of post Cold War guilt grappling experience for East Germans, I think it might be possible that rebuilding Jewish historic buildings in former East Germany is a broader way for East Germans to give tangible shape and create space and protection for their own local histories and sense of regional identities and that the fortification of synagogue walls was made necessary by the fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, a reaction to the identity challenges and social crises brought on by reunification ... So that is sort of where I am right now. Stay tuned for when I decide I am totally wrong in about 3 days.
Speaking of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I also attended a fascinating conference called Falling Walls on Sunday and Monday. The conference brought together leading academics from diverse disciplines to discuss the next walls to fall in various fields of interest, from science, to math, to anthropology to art. The conference began in the art studio of Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist working in Berlin, who creates art that experiments with space, technology, the environment, etc. His work is pretty cool, and you may have heard about some of his projects, including one in which he turned a river in Tokyo green. On Monday the conference was held in a really interesting old building on the banks of the Spree River, which helped form what was still considered the most dangerous border in the world 21 years previously on that day, the day before the wall came down. Some of the most interesting speakers discussed breaking down the walls of blindness, how we understand nature v. nurture, how we think about curing HIV/AIDS, how we envision successful world economies (ie the China model), etc. For the second time I heard from President Christian Wulff, and the Prime Minister of Belgium, currently the President of the EU rotating Presidency, Yves Leterme.
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