Jewish culture between interdependences and uniqueness
Jewish cultural life in Germany appears to be sealed off. Memorials and speeches, police controls and klezmer music festivals; Jewish life in Germany takes place behind security checks and on a few festive occasions. Inside, however, Jewish life in Germany acquires a very different dimension. “The Jewish culture is very varied. It is located right here in Berlin.” So says Sigalit Meidler- Waks, head of Berlin’s Jewish Adult Education Center, which is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. “Today, however, German Jewishness is frequently and repeatedly reduced to the 12 years of National Socialism.”
The Jewish artists, writers and musicians who have chosen to live in Germany don’t identify anymore as displaced persons, survivors or outsiders whom society dismisses as provisional citizens. However: “The dead belong to the past and also to the present; the dead force us to be silent voices from the great beyond or people who audibly cry for a more human world” – so Edward van Voolen, curator at the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, who has also been working in Germany for years.
The works of many contemporary Jewish artists show traces of remembering Jewish life and a cultural memory generated by the Shoa. But – and this is a far cry from two decades ago – it is not about signs of loss or the picturing of Jewish customs for a non- Jewish public, but about current discourse in society.
Change of perspective
Since the immigration of Russian- speaking Jews and a large number of Israeli artists to Berlin a very defi nite change of perspective has taken place. One of the most successful contemporary painters is Pavel Feinstein. Born in Moscow in 1960, he grew up in Tadjikistan and has been living in Berlin since 1980. He absorbs traditional genres and paints as the old masters, almost in the style of Ilya Repin. But he integrates seemingly biblical motifs into a modern context. His painting is in the Jewish tradition of always interpreting and developing biblical texts. In a way his work is subversive – he plays with Jewish traditions, conventions in painting and the expectations of the viewer. Working on a double bottom is typical of many artists of the second and third generation. They are trying to bring art and the story of life into a creative dialogue.
As different as their biographies might seem, the experiences of being a minority in a larger society connects those who grew up in post-war Germany with the contigency refugees from post-Soviet Russia after 1990, with American Jews or Israelis, who have come to Germany in the past few years. Lena Gorelik, born in 1981, has had the experience of growing up in two cultures. “I was 11 when, in 1992, my family emigrated from St. Petersburg to Swabia. I was, therefore, in the right age to learn German as if it were my mother tongue, I was young enough to absorb the German mentality, and old enough not to forget my Russian roots completely. I think and dream in German, but there is nothing more delicious for me than Russian potato salad and Russian cookies, which are so hard that you can break your teeth on them. This occasionally puts me in a schizophrenic situation: I am not standing between two worlds; on the contrary, I feel at home in both of them. That leads to me to defend Russian immigrants as soon as they are attacked. Simultaneously I don’t know a more unforgiving critic than me.” Ms. Gorelik describes her fi rst contretemps with the small German Jewish community, which saw itself engulfed by the Russian speaking wave of immigrants. “Somehow I never forgot the feeling of being left out, of being excluded.” Just as Pavel Feinstein, Ms. Gorelik works with stereotypes. Her most recent book is appropriately titled: “What, you speak German?” Her colleague, Wladimir Kaminer, born in Moscow in 1967, also writes his articles and observations about everyday Berlin in German. He is, however, less interested in the Jewish experience than in the eccentricities of his new compatriots: “Typically German but nonetheless comical.” There is, however, a hidden strand that connects most contemporary Jewish artists in Germany and in all of central Europe, with religion as a repository of identifi cation and with the validity of religious traditions. Many see that the Jewish community in Germany cannot be defi ned by practicing their religion. Lena Gorelik: “Of course the Russian Jews know no traditions and no prayers, they have no knowledge of religion, but, thanks to anti-Semitism in Communism they have a much greater feeling of their Jewishness. Call it ‘kitchen Jewishness’. That’s not a worse form of Jewishness, only a different kind of Jewishness”. The broad spectrum of Jewish culture in Germany can be seen in the choice of artists given awards by the Berlin foundation “Zurückgegeben” (Given back). Among the chosen projects is a novel about Jewish identity in the former east German Communist regime, and the production of a theater comedy “Glatt Koscher”, a search for “traces” in the Chernobyl region and a book project about how Jews living in Berlin yearn for their homeland Israel. The Berlin composer Sarah Nemtsow will be working on her composition cycle “Bridges”; an approach to the tales “The emigrants” of the non-Jewish writer W. G. Sebald, who died in 2001. The works therefore span the self-finding of Jews to documentations of Jewish life to l’art pour l’art. This too will become clear: there exists no Jewish culture which can stand by itself without being part of the surrounding world. Jewish artists today are once again a part of the diverging artistic movements of our modern, pluralistic societies. And, as Lena Gorelik says, Jewish artists are an example of “how migrants change Germany and why that is a good thing.”