by janet silver ghent
correspondent
On the surface, journeying to Berlin to write about the Scottish philosopher David Hume seems a bit of a detour. In fact, it was. Yet in the process, self-described atheist Wendy Lesser wound up confronting her relationship to Judaism, to Germany and to the human capacity for good and evil.
Her eighth book, “Room for Doubt,” is a three-part memoir about her relationship to Berlin, Hume and the late Leonard Michaels, the writer and U.C. Berkeley English professor, whom she describes as a “difficult friend.”
What ties it together is her musings on God — whom she doesn’t believe in, “but I dislike Him anyway” — art, ethics and the dark side, including the dark side of love.
But why Berlin, the capital of a country that she vowed never to visit? She offered a rather mundane answer: “I had a fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin and had three and a half months to work on anything I wanted,” Lesser said during an interview from Berkeley, where she edits the Threepenny Review.
Growing up in a secular family in Palo Alto, Lesser writes that she’s “never been a very good Jew.” She celebrated Christmas and went to school on Jewish holidays. Yet in some ways, Hitler and the Holocaust defined her Judaism, though she was born in 1952, seven years after Hitler’s death. She “found it incomprehensible” that friends could actually enjoy trips to Germany.
What surprised her most about Berlin was “how at home I felt there,” as well as how Jewish Berlin felt. “It made no sense that I would love Berlin. I had no idea that this is one of my hidden Jewish homelands … Berlin had my personality written all over it. My little quirks, preferences, shortcomings, those found a home in Berlin.”
What made her feel at home were not the city’s Jewish institutions. She never set foot in a synagogue, and was put off by Berlin’s myriad monuments to Holocaust victims. No fan of architect Daniel Libeskind, she describes the Berlin Jewish Museum, which he designed, as “an artily off-kilter structure whose sense of ‘dislocation’ is more suited to a modern-art museum than a monument to the displaced, and I was deeply offended … by its grotesque breast-beating.”
Nor was she moved by the presence of brass plaques marking those who were murdered. “I don’t do crying over things like that. It gets my back up. I don’t like being plaqued,” she said.
However, Berlin put her in touch with her “Jewish self,” even though she has “no affinity whatsoever with the Jewish religion because I have no affinity with any religion.”
Lesser felt “absolutely comfortable with a culture strongly shaped by Jews,” from the late-19th century to 1933. She was entranced by the myriad of museums and concert halls, and felt at home with the language, perhaps because of its similarity to Yiddish. When her watch needed repair, she could tell the shopkeeper that it was “kaput,” and be perfectly understood.
More to the point, she began to see Jews and Germans as “symbolic people,” victim and perpetrator, joined at the hip. But beyond that, she writes, Germany “has produced a nation of people who are very much alive to their own capacity for unforgivable behavior — a capacity, they have learned, that is completely in keeping with being a nice, civilized, conventional sort of person in ordinary life. It is this knowledge about their own darkest side which made the Germans seem so admirable to me.”
She was scheduled to discuss her experiences at a reception Thursday, Feb. 22 at the German Consulate in San Francisco.
Berlin, she writes, “never forgets its own past, and it never lets you forget it.”
During her sojourn, she stayed in Wannsee not far from the house, now a museum, where plans for the Final Solution were drawn up.
The moral issues she grapples with in the book are not just about Germans and Jews but also about “our own capacity for unforgivable behavior.” Germans born in the 1960s or later have been taken on field trips to concentration camps, she pointed out. “That says something about the nature of German culture. These things have been preserved.”
“Room for Doubt” by Wendy Lesser (205 pages, Pantheon, $23.95).
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California