The Truth Is ‘Ansteckend’: Weimar, Then and Now |
“It is a worthy dream; many of us still hold on to it.” — Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites
I learned the word “ansteckend” on a bus in Weimar. Someone yawned, and then I yawned, and then two other girls yawned, and someone said that yawning was contagious — ansteckend — and that was how it entered my vocabulary. On a bus, in the early morning, in May, in a city that had once held within a few kilometers the highest aspirations of European civilization and the worst atrocity it ever produced.
Weimar is that kind of place. Goethe lived here, Schiller too. Nietzsche spent his final lucid years in a house on the Frauenplan before his mind gave out. Bauhaus was founded here. In 1919, the first German democracy was proclaimed here because Berlin was too unstable. And eight kilometers up the road, on the Ettersberg hill where Goethe used to walk, the regime that destroyed that democracy built Buchenwald. The distance between the Goethe-Schiller monument in the town square and the camp on the hill is not a paradox that requires explanation; it’s just the distance. And you feel it when you live there.
I spent time there as a teenager — a Jewish American girl whose grandmother had come from Germany, riding that bus to school in the mornings, walking the muddy streets, learning words. This was several years after the Wall had come down, and Weimar was becoming bright and alive, new paint going up over old façades, the future being laid over the past in real time. But the past was still physically present. My host family’s bathroom still had the old East German tiles, brown, with blue and red rims around the faucets. In the kitchen there were utensils stamped with the names of manufacturers that no longer existed. The city was shedding its skin, slowly, so you could still see what was underneath.
Earlier this month, the German court upheld a ban against a group called “Kufiyas in Buchenwald.” They had planned a vigil at the concentration camp memorial — to protest, in their words, “the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.” The protest was moved to a square in the city instead.
I felt relief. And then the jolt of the uncertainty about next time.
My host parents had grown up in the former East Germany, in a state that had declared itself antifascist by decree, largely leaving the actual reckoning to others. Sometimes on weekends I sat with elderly people over Kaffee und Kuchen who told me, with wide eyes, how terrifying the Allied bombings had been — their voices carrying a weight that seemed to want something from me, but I was too polite to say what I might have said. I’m not sure I even knew what I was thinking. It was only later, looking back, that I understood why this may have felt awkward — the Jewish American girl in the room, trying to be a good guest, while something much older moved beneath the surface of the conversation.
One weekend I took the train to Dresden with a friend. Her stepbrother showed us around. It seemed like everything was under construction. After a boring boat ride along the Elbe, we hit the shops and my friend bought orange platform sneakers. That night, we danced until three in the morning at a techno club and woke up to the most delicious smell — Rinderrouladen. That afternoon, the family ate and sat together. Someone showed me a book of photographs of Dresden before the war — a city of extraordinary beauty, documented as if in anticipation of its own destruction. Someone brought out the photo albums. Paging through them, I noticed the small circular pins on the lapels of relatives in some of the family pictures.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it. I was a teenager with a messy ponytail and circles under her eyes who had been dancing until three in the morning. I kept passing the cake.
My host mom was a teacher at my school. At home she was warm and funny — the kind of person who noticed everything, who always made sure we didn’t run out of Nutella, who secretly cleaned the mud off my shoes after I went to sleep, because I couldn’t understand why I should do this when the shoes would keep getting muddy. She had a sharp enough sense of humor to mention to a........