Berlin isn't the prettiest city in the world. Having been bombed pretty much flat in the war, it's been reconstructed in a rather haphazard fashion. Tacky "Wirtschaftswunder" and dreary socialist functionalism have not afforded us much in the way of architectural elegance and poise. However, like a "jolie laide", Berlin exudes that most attractive of all qualities - a sense of life. She may not be the most beautiful girl in the class, but you know she'll be a lot of fun to go out with!
Three days was inevitably barely enough to scratch the surface, but we were able to stay focused enough to get a reasonable amount of tourism done! Standard stuff, I suppose - the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, Unter den Linden, Pergamon Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, Jewish Museum, Ku'damm, Scheuneviertel, Spree boat ride, Alte Nationalgalerie. Not a bad "bag". The still visible war damage on the unrestored buildings on the Museumsinsel was eerily evocative - an extravagant juxtaposition of man's loftiest cultural ideals and his capacity for violent depravity.
The most fascinating, though psychologically most demanding, visit was to the Jewish Museum.
I am not Jewish - at least I don't think so, although my mother used sometimes to hint darkly at "strange blood" on her father's side! Yet the idea of Jewishness has always exercised a special fascination over me. As a small boy, growing up in Ealing, there were always Jewish kids around. My very best childhood friend was Nick Berg - we were constantly in and out of each others places. My mother was very good friends with his mother and continued to write to her long after we moved from London. I can remember being vaguely jealous of him getting his Hannukah presents before my Christmas presents! All to say that Jewishness seemed the most natural thing in the world.
I also remember the profound sense of embarrassment which came over me when I first came across the holocaust. I must have been twelve at the time. I'd saved up my pocket-money to buy "The Bantam Illustrated History of World War Two". I was showing off my acquisition to my friends at school, when one boy ( surnamed David, incidentally), turning to those appalling photographs of Belsen, suggested that my parents might not be too happy at my viewing this sort of material. I was so ashamed that I tore the offending pages out of the book and burned them!
Even today, I still find all that holocaust stuff hard to take. The more you learn about it, the more it staggers the mind. The "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" - it's totally cuckoo! And yet thousands actively pursued it and millions passively acquiesced in it. Institutions like the Jewish Museum are there as part of an extremely broadly based "never forget, never again " campaign, which is very courageously and generously supported by the German state.
The museum is largely housed in a modern construction by the architect Daniel Libeskind. Built in a deliberately lopsided manner, with strange angles and slopes, the outside marked with zig-zag scars, it evokes an unpleasant feeling of emptiness and imbalance, as of a world out-of-kilter, oppressive in its sense of absence.
The exhibition itself takes us through the history of the Jews in Germany, from the medieval period through to the holocaust and beyond. It seems there was always a precarious aspect to Jewish life in Germany, sadly predictable in a situation where a minority group seeks consciously to distinguish itself from the majority culture. Everything may appear to be going all right, but there's always the danger of the population running amok at the full moon. From the 19th century, however, Jews were becoming increasingly assimilated and enjoying greater possibilities for advancement. As we reach the twentieth century, we start to see the photographs of nice, middle-class Jewish families, looking happily and confidently into the camera, full of intellectual curiosity and cultural creativity. It breaks your heart to think that all that was destroyed. These are my kind of people, the people who give life its colour and zest!
I remember a conversation with my old mentor, Hans Fluger. We were discussing the failure to communicate the idea of Europe to the population at large. Hans was categorical: "Not enough Jews! If we had more Jews they'd bloody sell it. They'd write the books, make the films, create a whole ground-swell of opinion! We've destroyed much of the cultural leavening which our society so badly needs. They are cosmopolitans, natural Europeans." But then again, without the catastrophe of the Second World War, there would never have been the same urgency behind the desire to create a united Europe...
Of course, the terrible and almost unmentionable contradiction is that a degree of oppression is possibly necessary if the continued existence of Jews as a seperate people is to be assured. The real danger to a separate Jewish identity is assimilation - that over time they will be absorbed into the general population and Jewishness will be reduced to an accidental quirk, rather like red hair or being left-handed. There's always Israel as a sort of fall-back, but the state of Israel is the source of so much injustice, real or perceived, that it cannot be seen as a cast-iron guarantee of the survival of Jewishness over the centuries.
The Judaic religion, its teachings, traditions and dietary laws, has, viewed from an historical perspective, been the real guarantor of a separate Jewish identity. But it seems to me that Judaism too is fraught with contradiction. The notion of monotheism, that all life, in its infinite variety, partakes of the One Life, is conceivably the greatest conceptual breakthrough in the history of civilization. In other words, monotheism is almost by definition a universal religion, a fact borne out, I would argue, by the extraordinary success of Judaism's two major offshoots, Christianity and Islam. And yet, this essentially universal religion has to serve as a tribal cult, as it were, to protect the continued separate existence of a specific ethnicity. Which begs the question: "Does the survival of Jewishness matter?" Personally, I have always found nationalism embarrassing and those that attribute all sorts of qualities to themselves by virtue of their mere ethnic identity utterly pathetic. Still, the idea that we should be reduced to a homogeneous coffee-coloured mass, devoid of all difference and distinction is a fairly depressing prospect. What is needed is a higher comprehension of what it might mean to accept and understand that we can, no, must acknowledge and welcome the fact of difference, but difference reconciled in that Oneness, which is the source of all life. It's probably something which takes a bit of practice.