by janet silver ghent
At a black-tie dinner some years ago, I was seated near an aristocratic European. He told me he was tired of hearing about the Holocaust. “Give it a rest,” he said.
That encounter left me with an unpleasant taste. But since then, I’ve been heartened by encounters with other Europeans, among them San Francisco’s new German consul general, who spoke recently at Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.
Rolf Schütte is familiar with the “give it a rest” attitude. He estimates that about 75 percent of Germans harbor a “sense of collective shame.” While they don’t deny the Holocaust, they don’t want to be reminded of it or made to feel guilty.
The Holocaust “both separates and binds together Germans and Jews like no other. They hardly ever talk about it [together], yet it’s always on people’s minds.”
Schütte’s visit to Beth Am was prompted by a column about my own experiences in Germany — and the shocked reactions of friends not just to my visit but to my study of German. I can understand Deutschophobia, but I don’t think it’s good for the Jews.
Neither does Schütte. In a pamphlet published by the American Jewish Committee, he wrote that Germans must not forget the lessons of the past. In turn, Jews need to “see Germany not as what it was, but as what it has become and is today.”
Born in 1953 in central Germany, Schütte never met a Jew until he was in his 30s. While spending three years at the German Embassy in Tel Aviv, he began a life-changing conversation with Israelis. Now he’s continuing that conversation with Bay Area Jews.
He speaks to Jewish groups several times a month, a personal mission quite separate from his diplomatic duties.
The attitudes of Israelis and American Jews are worlds apart, he said. Israelis frequently encounter German visitors who are atoning for the sins of their forebears, working on kibbutzim or getting involved in humanitarian projects, but Americans do not.
While Israelis consider Germany their second-best friend internationally, American Jews are plagued by anxiety and mistrust. Only France is held in lower esteem.
Schütte wants to change those perceptions. That’s why he spent part of his 2004-‘05 sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at the American Jewish Committee in New York, where he wrote a report titled “German-Jewish Relations, Today and Tomorrow,” a topic he addresses frequently.
After speaking at Beth Am, he was surrounded by so many people, he could barely grab a cup of tea. For many, it was the first time they spoke frankly with a German about the Holocaust and contemporary Germany.
Uriela Ben-Yaacov, whose mother was at Auschwitz, asked Schütte his reaction when he first found out about the Holocaust. He recalled his grandmother telling him about a Jewish merchant who “disappeared … So many disappeared.” When he asked where they went, she said, “We didn’t know.”
Schütte had one Nazi grandfather. The other, a Democratic Socialist, didn’t allow his son to attend a school that would prepare him to be an SS officer. “They took [my father] away,” he said. “They took him to Russia at age 17, to Stalingrad.”
Ben-Yaacov said Schütte “had a lot of integrity to speak about [the Holocaust] in front of us. He opened up our hearts. Our hearts were closed.”
Some were unaware that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany’s Jewish population has more than quadrupled, to between 120,000 and 200,000, thanks to immigration from the former Soviet Union. In 1989, it was 30,000.
During my 2004 visit, I witnessed a burgeoning of Jewish culture, particularly in Berlin, where the new Jewish Museum has drawn more than 3.5 million visitors.
Yet that culture is not what it was before the war. Addressing a meeting of the AJCommittee, Schütte was challenged by an elderly woman with a Berlin accent.
“I was in Berlin,” she told him. “They say there is new Jewish life. We went to the symphony. They hear klezmer music.”
Janet Silver Ghent, former senior editor of j., is a freelance writer/editor living in Palo Alto. She can be reached at ghentwriter@gmail.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California