While in Berlin, on my Red Berlin walking tour, I told my tour guide briefly about the play I've been writing since my last visit, and asked if he had any insight into the daily lives of East Berliners. He recommended I read Stasiland, a book by Anna Funder, an Australian writer who lived in Berlin for a time in the 90s, while Germany was still rebuilding itself. I bought the book recently, and over the last week have spent every train ride to and from work disappearing into East Germany, a country that no longer exists, but whose citizens are still largely alive and well, some only a few years older than I am. Both sides of my family have roots in Germany, and lately I constantly wonder what my life would have been like if I had grown up there.
Tonight I went to my pre-trip orientation for my Birthright trip to Israel. Birthright is a gift of a free ten day trip, from the government of Israel and Jewish communities around the world, to young adults of Jewish heritage. I come from a multi-faith family in a multi-faith country. I always felt, growing up, that I didn't really have much of a national heritage, because the heritage of America, as it was taught to me and as I've experienced it for twenty-five years, is that our nation is a one of many nations. In the scheme of countries globally, we're on the young side. We don't have thousands of years of history as a nation. And similarly, in the religious sphere, I grew up Unitarian Universalist, the religion of many religions. Because my mom grew up Christian and my dad was raised Jewish, I, like so many children of interfaith marriages, grew up in a church full of families with diverse backgrounds and beliefs. Unitarian Universalism came from the merging of two religions and technically, by definition, is a cult, because it is less than one hundred years old since the merger.
Neither my national nor my religious heritage have the longest historical background. That has always made me feel a little lost, in the greater scheme of things. I applied for the Birthright trip because I am desperate for a deeper connection to something, to my Jewish heritage. Judaism has rather a long history, you could say. But I grew up as "the only Hanukkah kid in my class," as I said when I came home from one of my first days of Kindergarten. I lit Hanukkah candles with my family in November or December throughout my childhood, and that was most of my experience of "being Jewish" for a long time. I have only attended four Bar/Bat Mitzvahs in my life, all for people I am barely or almost related to - children of my dad's cousin (second cousins? Once removed? I never know), his college friend's daughter, my "cousin" who is the child of my "uncle" Marty, another of my dad's closest college friends. But I had no such experience myself. I have only been to Synagogue on those four occasions. The only Hebrew I know is the Hannukah prayers, and that's memorization more than actual comprehension.
So I float, tradition-less, through a young secular country, and obsess over strange things. I have always felt a connection to the Holocaust even though my Jewish grandparents were born in New York. Gas masks disturb me like nothing else. I spend ten minutes of rare hour-long Skype call with my brother talking about German history from World War II to now. I text my friend John, a grad student studying the holocaust and genocide, at 10 am on a Monday morning, asking for clarifications on the Nazi-Soviet conflict and the differences between communism, socialism, and fascism during the Cold War. I am becoming an encyclopedia on the lives of strangers that lived in a country that dissolved just months before I was born.
I am German; I am Jewish. But actually I am neither; I am American and Unitarian. My passport says I have been to Germany, and soon it will say I have been to Israel, but my passport was issued by the United States of America. My passport says, in the form of seven stamps at the back, that I have pretended to travel between East and West Berlin, places that no longer exist except in the experiences of millions of now-just-German citizens. The truth lies in the date of the stamps, 30 Oktober, 2011, 22 years after the fall of the Wall.
I read my books; I write my play. I listen to Led Zeppelin and Bowie records and disappear into the 70s. I try to tell the stories of people I never knew, a place I have never been to, because Berlin and Germany are unified again now. A place and people that have nothing to do with a twenty-five year old girl from Chicago who lives in New York and has never been anything but American, who has never fled any kind of persecution or oppression and is only now becoming "woke" enough to realize the police state we live in. (Please watch Citizenfour. I don't know what to do about what I learned from it, but just watch it.)
Daily I feel small, alone though by my own choosing. I have always been independent, but now I exist like a satellite in orbit of the lives around me, away from family, friends, sometimes sanity. I shut out the problems of 21st century New York to despair in those of Cold War Berlin, and still try to find a way to make the two eras talk to each other as we shut out refugees, and threaten the building of new walls, and want to increase surveillance on possible terrorists, and barring an entire faith population from our country. I would have lived a different life as a German Jew in the 40s. I would have lived a different life as an Eastern German in the 70s. But those lives are still being lived now, by different faiths in different countries, and I just want people to wake up.
That's what my play is for, if I can ever finish it. As I read and research more, I feel the scope expanding, sure it will one day soon escape my grasp. There are such big concepts at play. My access point is a history I was never taught but almost lived, from so many angles.
I wear still in this moment my name tag from the Birthright event tonight. It says my name, my trip organizer - Tlalim Israel Outdoors, and my departure date. I feel suddenly just now, like I'm wearing a yellow star, but without the danger. "This is when she will claim her history." It labels me as at least Jewish-adjacent, with a date for the homeland. Getting on a plane, not a train, in safety, not in fear. To celebrate something that was once supposed to be hidden, shameful, dirty. To confront a lost heritage, color in a missing part of my identity as I have tried to do so many times on so many trips.
For me, my Jewish-ness is tied up in my German-ness, two identities that were once so at odds, though my existence as a union of the two is not uncommon. Both cultures are shadowed by a history of conflict - and Israel isn't exactly history's most peaceful country, and that at only sixty-seven years old. I sit here, at 11 pm on a Thursday night in New York, trying to come to terms with all of my perceived history that is not mine at all - that of Germany, of Israel, of Jusaism, and, after a while, of America, that to which I can actually lay claim but don't know how. What is the meaning of being American? Freedom? Fear? God and guns? So much of what America stands for seems either false or terrible. But then again, I have never been interrogated simply because I wished to travel, or had a boyfriend from another country, or because I dissented from my leader's politics. I can say what I want. I suppose it's just a question, now, of whether it is heard, or whether I want it to be.
