Waking up was a blur - probably because it was about 2:30
a.m. in America and I’m sometimes awake but not often waking up then. I forgot
how much I like Europe until breakfast. Oh, the cheeses and breads and spreads
and fruits – it makes me think I should eat breakfast more often, and if I
lived here, I would. I made a sandwich of a multigrain slice, a ciabatta slice,
some brie and some blackberry jam, which was dubbed ‘epic’ by a groupmate. As I
ate it with some chocolate soymilk on our walk to the morning meeting point, I
was much more elated to be traveling than I had been in the haze that was the
last two days. The sandwich was epic, so the day began with great potential.
When we got to Rosenstrasse, Director Dagmar was late, but
then said she’d buy us all coffee. And made good on that promise later with one
of the most expensive Starbucks purchases the Mitte Starbucks has ever seen, I’m
sure: 20 drinks at 4€ a piece is some serious caffeinated damage. But, before
the mocha detour, we stood in a park for 90 minutes. Berlin is unpleasantly hot
and cold, with spats of rain, and that, I dislike. The tour was titled Empty
Spaces: Don’t Trust the Green Grass. Curious and creative at once, no? In the
park, Dagmar told us a lot of framing information to design her discourse – she
is the kind of PhD you want as a professor because she is brilliant and
accessible, validating and challenging. We stood on the foundation of Berlin’s
first synagogue, built in the early 1700s by 50 Viennese families in exile from
a 1681 pogrom. Nothing marks this space, but looming industrial apartments
hover over and dogs do their business on the grass that fills the space where
Torah was once read. The park is also home to a monument to a group of women
who intermarried Jewish men. These women successfully protested the Holocaust
deportation of their husbands, shouting ‘Give Us Our Husbands” in a public
square at Rosenstrasse, and the men were returned. We talked about the
controversial story, how narratives are constructed, and why people don’t know
about the Women on Rosenstrasse. The monument is also in East Berlin, which the
Soviets ran until just before I was born, so intellectual controversial
monuments with religious associations are kind of unexpected and hidden there. Nothing marks the synagogue ruins at all. No
stone, no plaque – just remnants that look like a short path to nowhere.
Next stop was Starbucks, and then a brief pause at some gold
cobblestones. These stumbling blocks bear the names of Holocaust victims who
lived in these homes and were torn from them and murdered during WWII. It’s
controversial that people step on them, but they are also a noticeable and
important citywide testimony to memory. We followed on to an ivy garden with a
large tombstone to Moses Mendelssohn, the father of Jewish Enlightenment who
believed in the ability to balance Jewish observance and secular life. Turns
out he is buried somewhere in the ivy, along with hundreds of other Jews since
1682, but it’s been destroyed since. A few recovered tombstones scatter the
right side wall, shadowed by fancy apartment buildings. Across the street, a
400-student Jewish high school, founded by Mendelssohn, is back in use today. It’s
interesting that Berlin doesn’t have a typical Jewish quarter, no former ghetto
– Jews lived scattered around the city, integrated into different
neighborhoods. Near the graveyard, many restaurants advertise as kosher but
offer only kosher wine lists and have no hashgacha (official kosher auspices) –
one once told Dagmar they were kosher ‘because they don’t serve fish.’ Last
time I checked that’s not entirely even a piece of what kosher means, so this
winelist act is some kind of awkward cultural tourism scam which was one of the
many things that made me uncomfortable today. And this was all before I went to visit the first concentration camp I'd been to. Part two of the day continues with reactions to that experience, beer, and prostitutes, which maybe shouldn't all go in the same sentence, but it's all in Berlin in a day...
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