Weimar Redux Eight

LETTER to Petra: The Martin Walser brouhaha gets more and more tangled. Yesterday, the German Booksellers Association gave him their Author of the Year award.

I've never seen a country with more art and literature awards. Maybe I'm just brainwashed by my contempt for Pop Cult honors--Grammies, Addies, Oscars, Emmies, most of them ending in diminutives to suggest the irrelevance of honors in an allegedly egalitarian culture. But I never pick up the daily Weimar Nachricten or Allgemeine without reading about serious award, usually with a cash prize not to be sneezed at.

Was this always so, or is part of Germany's restoring its pride in itself? Yesterday, for example, MDR Kultur Kafe at the Dorint Hotel did a live discussion under the peculiar rubric, "German or Happy?" The heaviest thinker was the director of the Buchenwald memorial who said his first awareness of being "different" as a German was when the parents of his first girlfriend in Paris wouldn't let him into their house because he was a "Bosch"!

That World War I sneer must have sounded strange to a man born in 1950! And a political editor from Berliner Tagespiegel recounted about how his Interrail tickets to diverse parts of Europe (he cited Italy and Denmark) brought him into contacts with students who just assumed as a German he would be dour and boring, too serious. What a chore to be always worrying about what the rest of the world thinks of you.

I think I'd be on Walser's side when it comes to Holocaust overload. The twentieth century is rife with tragedies: Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, to just start an endless litany. Leninism, Maoism.

And as for anti-Semitism I find Germans, especially university students and graduates, freer than most of the other countries I've come in contact with. There used to be a ritual frenzy from the American Jewish Committee about UN third world countries accusing Israel of "racism".

From the Arab's perspective, Israelis are racist. They keep harping on their being a "chosen people" and secretly (for the most part) despise Palestinians as "sand niggers". (I didn't invent that despicable sneer.) And now the Orthodox Jewish students in Israel are reported (IHT, 2/2/99,p.6) as yelling at American Reform rabbis attempting to pray at the Wailing Wall that they should go back to Germany to be exterminated! Because they allow women to wear kippas and pray with their men.

"Never again" is the way I feel when I read about such religious extremists. In the same issue there is a story about how pregnant unmarried women are outcasts in Muslim Algeria. One pathetic creature was raped by her employer's son. He goes Scot-free and she is thrown into the street. When the archbishop of San Francisco lobbies before the Board of Supervisors against equal partnership legislation, I feel the same fury at the survival of foolish theological doctrines.

And here's the latest wrinkle in the Berlin Holocaust Memorial industry. David Liebeskind is accusing Peter Eisenman of plagiarism in his toned down revised design! And it's becoming an open secret that more and more German editorialists are wondering out loud why two American Jews hold a monopoly on the Berlin memorials. Oh vey. It reminds me of Richard Meier's Uriah Heapy thanks to the Frankfurt burgers at the dedication of his Museum of Decorative Arts for giving the commission to me (a poor little old ) Jew.

The only thing worse than the Holocaust is Holocaust Hustling. Finally, it ought to be added, the Swiss, German, and Austrian banks and insurance companies are owning up to their thievery. But the same ideologues who chant Fairness and Equity for Jewish victims laugh at the notion that American blacks are owed reparations. What a mess. Of course the Poles went bananas with their sorcerer's apprentice plethora of crosses at Auschwitz. On the other hand was it kosher to kick out the nuns who wanted to pray there.

I think Jews ought to remember the obverse of Shylock's plaint about bleeding. Jews are not the only people who have suffered in history. They are just better organized in their complaints. And more intelligent in their maneuverings. Did you ever read "The Jewish Mystique" by the conservative American philosopher Ernst van den Haag.

He speculates that the reason Jews are so much more gifted than the rest of us stems from the fact that for a thousand years Jewish rabbis had the pick of the village's maidens for wives whilst their Catholic counterparts were dysgenically celibate! As an agnostic I can't believe the Jehovah/Moses explanation. But you've got to admit, you guys are on the average smarter. Right?