History and Family Stories
I had two marvellous grandfathers. Both were Jewish communists - and communist Jews. Only to the circumstance that they were communist Jews, I owe my existence. How come?
Wolfgang Steinitz could have remained with his family in the country of his exile, in Sweden. They say the parting from Sweden has been mighty difficult for my father Klaus, 14 years old in 1946.
Kurt Stern, my grandfather on mother's side, could have struck roots in Mexico where he had immigrated with wife and child in 1941. Or in his beloved France, the homeland of his wife. The blossoming of my mother under southern sun, as I experienced it several times, lets me assume that she could have lived a life that corresponds more to her nature in Mexico as well as in France.
But my grandfathers were communist Jews - and therefore they had never stopped dreaming of a Germany after Hitler. Both had wished nothing more ardently in all the years in exile - Kurt Stern with the care of the German culture in the Heinrich Heine club in Mexico town centre, Wolfgang Steinitz during the writing of a Russian text book for Germans in Stockholm - than to return to their homeland. And there to take part in developing the "New Germany".
My grandfathers were inspired of an ideology, and so they were great idealist: Without hesitating, they returned immediately after the war to a completely destroyed country, to uncertain conditions. They did so, although they must have been sure to find compatriots who had persecuted them as Jews and communists or at least had been silent to their persecution. For Kurt Stern it was the country of the murderers of his parents!
Nevertheless: They believed firmly in being able "to clear the rubble in the hearts and minds of the people" with their glow (K. Stern) and to replace it by the idea of the new, the better society. (It shall not be my subject here how degenerated, perverted and illegitimate this idea already was at this time).
I don't believe in communism. But still I owe to it and its attraction on my grandfathers that both, although Jews, returned to Germany with their families after the Holocaust. And that after that - the Soviet zone of occupation had long been called GDR - their children, my parents, met, fell in love and multiplied ... and that I emerged from this relationship.
Jewish communists
How could Jews after the Holocaust return to the "land of the perpetrators" without hesitation although nearly all other Jews couldn't have brought themselves to do so and partly to the present day aren't able or willing to set foot in the country of their parents?
I know nearly nothing about German Jews in the Federal Republic before the wall came down, about their reasons to live in Germany. I do not know how they bear with the knowledge to live together with possible murderers or children of murderers of their relatives. And therefore I can write only about what I think I know a little: my Jewish-communist grandfathers. For them only one explanation occurs to me: to be a communist required, if necessary with the family, to break with traditions, with the "bourgeois" past, if "the cause" dictated it. The "cause", that was to take part in the construction of the anti-fascist, thus communist Germany. And this "cause", was more important than anything else. Everything that endangered this cause was to be repressed.
I maintain that Jewish communists in the GDR had a particularly large amount to repress from the beginning. More still than their comrades who had to repress the compulsory collectivisation, the Moscow processes, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the already available knowledge about the GULAG and many things more. In the first place and again and again they had to repress the lie which already lay in the foundation myth of the State of GDR: Alone from the circumstance that at its top stood communists, anti-fascists, persecuted by the Nazis, it was derived that the GDR was a country without a (Nazi) past. The country of those Germans who didn't have to do anything with fascism, with which Holocaust. Those Germans, who didn't have anything to compensate for (and therefore also didn't have to recognise Israel, let alone pay compensation). The perpetrators, the Nazis and neo-Nazis, the revenge-seekers and racists, they were - thank God - thrown into the west. In our schools it was taught which crimes the national socialists had committed. But the members of NSDAP, HJ, BDM, SS, SA and Wehrmacht - they were people with which we GDR citizens had to do about just as little as with Martians or at least Polynesians. Not the Holocaust was denied (Mina) but the joint responsibility of the East Germans. This repression, the ordered absence of history and the disencumberment in the GDR, was a continuation of the German mentality of "I-didn't-know-of-nothing" during the national socialism.
But not only as social beings my grandfathers must have repressed particularly much. To be a Jewish communist did not only mean to "swallow" the mendacious foundation myth because it justified the existence of the communist ideology turned into a state. It also meant to deny a part of oneself. It meant to cut off ones personal roots - where I assume that this root cutting with both of them already happened far earlier, perhaps already in the labour movement of their youth.
In both families, as I experienced and experience them, the Jewish descent, Jewish history, customs and traditions have not been a topic. How could Kurt Stern repress that his parents had died in the camp because they were Jews? And how Wolfgang Steinitz to have a brother - with children and their children - in Israel?
I am quite sure: My two grandfathers became ill with the new society. However with all their internal dissension and disruption they never withdrew from the party. Probably Wolfgang Steinitz who admired nothing as glowingly as the Soviet Union never got over the XX. Party Congress of the CPSU. The cardiac infarct from which he died 11 years later overtook him in the evening of a day, at which he had had a great controversy at the academy; it can be only assumed of which kind it was. And Kurt Stern, a freethinker and contemplator, had most violent problems with the censorship already in the 50's, when he worked with the DEFA, the national film agency. Probably that's why he concentrated his longing and his commitment ever more on the distance where the "cause" seemed not yet discredited: He wrote about the Paris Commune, Cuba, Vietnam. After the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in the year 1976 he withdrew from all committees in the party and the writer's society and nearly completely grew silent in his last years.
What about me?
With all my disapproval of the actually existing socialism (which is far older than the "turn") I uncritically accepted at least the above described foundation myth of the GDR till the end. Until Michael at the family meeting asked me this very question: How it was for us to live in a people of at least potential murderers. (To me and the other Steinitz descendants of my generation it really applied even personally that our grandfathers had not been perpetrators or followers but had really been victims and resistance fighters. And nevertheless we knew that only few Germans were resistant to the regime.) I grew up without the knowledge of a family history and tradition that constitutes a part of me. And (except for one meeting with Dani, secretly arranged by my grandmother Inge Steinitz, which indeed remained impressively in memory until today) up to the age of 30 years I did not know more of my relatives in Israel than that they were there. Also the Italian family (like the Austrian and American branch of the Stern family) was most rarely to be seen by me as a child - "west contacts" were not desired in the household of my father.
In the meantime I began to fill in the gaps: Particularly with good Klezmer music (we didn't have it before the turn), which more than every other music fills me with an almost ineffable mixture of playful joy and deep melancholy. With 10 unbelievably tight days of Israel, which left me with exactly this torn feeling of enthusiasm and doubt (in fairy tales this is called "with wild pain"). With family visits in Italy, Austria and the USA (the last two with Stern descendants). And for a few weeks now with your stories. Since our meeting, since I began to become acquainted with you, I feel richer and stronger than before; naturally, also full of new, uncomfortable questions to myself.
My conclusion
from this history, which every day continues to write itself: I fear nothing more than any kind of fanaticism - no matter in which ideological habit it comes along. If humans have a conviction and try to live it I can see nothing dangerous about it. If however an idea takes possession of someone so much that it brings him to cut off a part of himself, that it "enables" him to betray his loved ones (which I do not attribute to any of my grandfathers!) then it becomes dangerous. When the own pain is drowned, repressed, there is only a short distance to a missionary passion that justifies to urge humans to their luck. If necessary by force.
26/08/98