I Sleep in Hitler's Room by Tuvia Tenenbom Read Free Book Online Page A

on that.”
    Brilliant. The exact answer I was waiting for. We Jews understand each other. I patiently wait for him to elaborate.
    Give a Jew time to elaborate and he takes it.
    Mr. Second Jew talks to me about national language. About Literature. About Collective Memory. He tells me that nations tend to be proud of the good things in their history and that so are the Germans. “But the Germans have a series of events in their history that they are ashamed of. Take, for example, the Holocaust, one word hinting at a whole complex.”
    And they live it to this day.
    “The Germans,” he says, “are very cautious to form a judgment about the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, because they are afraid of being called anti-Semites.”
    Plain and clear he sums it up for the First Jew:
    “The Holocaust is part of the cultural heritage of the Germans, and will remain so.”
    If you ever doubted whether this man was indeed a Jew, now you know for sure: A Certified Jew. Which, as is the custom between two Jews talking, brings me to ask him:
    For how long will this remain part of the German heritage?
    Jews, if you didn’t know by now, answer questions by asking another question. And so, to keep tradition alive, the Other Jew asks:
    “I’ll give you an example: How long ago was it when the Jews of Jerusalem were exiled by Nebuchadnezzar?”
    Two thousand years ago, I say.
    No Jew ever accepts another Jew’s response without correcting it. And so does Rabbi Helmut:
    “Twenty-five hundred years. More than twenty-five hundred years.”
    Now I got the answer. If we, Jews, mourn two thousand five hundred years, let the Germans mourn at least as much. And to make sure I got it totally right, the Rabbi adds:
    “The Holocaust will be remembered,” by the Germans, for “at least as long. Hundreds of years, thousands of years—it will remain. I do hope that this foreseeable future fact will lead the Germans to be extremely cautious in order to prevent any hint of repeating” such crimes.

    It is another custom of the Jews, in case you are not aware of it, to apply historical events to the present, and to mix past worries with current ones. So, I ask my Rabbi to explain to me the demos in Hamburg, the violence I saw on the streets.
    The Rabbi, as is dictated by rabbinical tradition, starts by proclaiming humility. He says:
    “It’s not my subject to talk about, because I haven’t been there, I don’t know.” And now that we got the Humility part down pat, the Rabbi—as is always the tradition—goes on to actually answer and Spread the Knowledge. He says: “But I’ve read in the newspapers that through the Internet they have organized people from all over the place to come to Hamburg just in order to have fun in using force. Quite a few of them are not Germans. Quite a few of them are of Turkish background. Some of them are what in former generations they have called anarchists. But not ideological anarchists. Just young people who would not accept any kind of authority. You see this in the outskirts of Paris, in some quarters in London. I don’t think it’s a specific German phenomenon. It has something to do with the electronic media. If you didn’t have television, if you didn’t have the Internet, it would have been much more difficult to organize such things.”
    My fellow Jew and myself, and perhaps you’ve figured it out on your own already, keep on smoking while talking. I am not really sure about the law in this country, if this behavior is legal or not, but one thing must be made clear right now: Nobody in Hamburg is going to stop two Smoking Jews. Forget it. If anybody is trying, they’ll immediately be accused of anti-Semitism. No German needs this on his or her résumé.
    And so, between smokes, I ask him:
    Are you proud to be German?
    “I have never expressed any pride about my culture.”
    Never?
    “No.”
    Would he like to have been part of another culture?
    “Also no.”
    And then, between one