Being a Jew in Berlin these days has become very fashionable, an integral part of the city’s self-conscious culture of remembrance and reconciliation. From Holocaust monuments, museums and memorials to books, historical studies, Yiddish folklore, food, film and Klezmer concerts, it has also become a profitable industry, one which Jewish cultural critic Iris Weiss claims has more in common with Disneyland than what it really means to be Jewish.
Iris and I have met for coffee in a café next-door to the Berlin’s largest synagogue. Bombed almost to rubble by the Allies, its magnificently reconstructed golden-striped dome has become one of the brightest landmarks of the city. We are also in the heart of a Jewish quarter, densely crowded with summer sightseers, which dates back to the Middle Ages. Within a block are the Anne Frank Museum, a Jewish high school and cemetery, an original workshop from the 1930s for blind Jews and a theatre that features Jewish music. All around, on apartment buildings and pavements are brass plaques listing families who died in concentration camps.
A couple of kilometres away on prime city real estate near the Brandenburg Gate and Unter den Linden, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is nearing completion. At a cost of around $50 million, the memorial consists of 2751 ash-coloured concrete pillars arranged in rows like a graveyard.
‘Germans perceive it as something for Jews,’ Iris tells me, a little scornfully. She says she prefers memorials that confront you unexpectedly in everyday life. In the Berlin suburb of Schöenerberg, for example, there is a 1930s plaque on a post outside a grocery store. On one side is a picture of bread, on the other a warning that Jews can only shop from 4 to 5pm.
In her late 40s, outspoken and independent, Weiss moved to Berlin a decade ago to take up a job as executive director of a government research project on women’s issues in German reunification. Now, as well as providing a comprehensively-researched tour of Jewish Berlin, she occasionally works as a journalist for the Jewish press. During the past year, her website has averaged 19,000 hits a month.
Weiss’s father was one of the few German Jews to survive the Nazis extermination program. In Berlin, out of a Jewish population of 170, 000, only around 6,100 were alive by the end of the war. Growing up in southern Germany, Weiss says one of