The Matter of Identity
W hat is my identity and what does
identity mean? I was born and raised in
Berlin in a liberal German-Jewish family. I left
by kindertransport for
London in 1939, and was interned and sent to Canada
in 1940 with over 2,000
other refugees. Of these, some 900 settled in Canada
in the late years of
the war. By now I have lived in Canada for over
sixty years, and during my
employed life I have devoted nearly all my time,
research and writing to
matters related to music in Canada. If national
identity were simply a
matter of choice I would be happiest to be nothing
but a Canadian.
But the recent Statistics Canada Census (long form)
inquired about my
ethnic origin and my religion. Should I answer Jewish
and Jewish? And here
I get in a conflict not only with the census designers
but with a majority
of Canadian Jews with ancestors in Eastern Europe
who feel themselves an
ethnic unit even more than adherents of a religion.
Ethnic origin: for generations my
ancestors have spoken nothing but German, the few Hebrew phrases my parents
knew from prayers were learned by rote;
they could hardly translate them. In my case ethnic
origin involves not only language (including a lifelong accent)-all the
books I read in my
youth were written in or translated into my mother
tongue-but also
folksongs, and cultural and geographical environment.
What else does
"ethnic" mean? To be honest, I put down "German"
on the census form.
Religion: The Census form (question 22) asked for
one's religion "even if
the person isn't practising." I answered "Jewish",
because I have a certain
interest in the history and sociology of religion,
though from childhood I
went to synagogue only when pushed, and in Canada
only for weddings or
funerals. Why does the Census want to bolster numbers
by including
non-believers?
Is an identity necessary? Is it a
matter of personal choice, or is it an
objective fact independent of my will, Jew-German-Canadian?
I can
distinguish three kinds of identity: involuntary,
forced and voluntary.
Involuntary identities are one's mother tongue,
one's family, childhood and
early environment. My fellow ex-internees all remember
identities forced
upon us-assuming the names of Sara or Israel in
1939 and a year later being
designated "Enemy Aliens-Prisoners of War, Second
Class." Voluntary
identity is one's decision to identify with a circle
of friends, a spouse,
a profession, a political party, a system of philosophy,
a club, a city or
a country.
As human beings we always remain tied to our youth. What then has happened to our ties with the German and Austrian countries of our birth? Among my fellow ex-refugees, I have observed a great variety of attitudes. It depends very much on the relative strength of memories of either a happy home and youth's irrepressible zest for life, or the suffering under Nazi brutality. It depends also on how successfully we have started a new life in Canada or elsewhere, and how "realistic" and adaptable a personality we have.
Realists live in the present. They
suppress the memory of horrible
experiences, refusing to visit Germany, speak German,
or take an interest
in German affairs. I can understand and respect
that. I have less sympathy
for those who consider every last German a former
Nazi supporter. I think
of the thousands of non-Jewish spouses who stuck
to their Jewish partners,
of the staunch non-Jewish anti-Nazis I met in internment,
of men such as
Thomas Mann, Pastor Niemoeller or Carl von Ossietzky-more
than a tiny
minority. For the thousands who cheered Hitler and
his parading troops
there were thousands who stayed at home or were
locked up in concentration camps.
Many other ex-refugees are neutral.
They return once to the town of their
birth, talk German when necessary, but have no inner
need to associate with
the people or their culture. But scratch beneath
the surface and you will
find the Viennese fond of his opera and his dialect
or the Berliner
glorying in his theatres and his local jokes. Their
mental equipment still
reflects Germany, whether they like it or not.
My own view of the German connection is more positive. I have never tried to force myself to adopt or abandon an identity. I have drifted where fate took me, to Canada, to Toronto, into a career specialty, even a happy marriage. I do not want to erase my fond memories of my family and my many anti-Nazi friends, my early summer holidays, my love of Berlin geography and dialect. I do not, cannot deny my strong German, nor my somewhat weaker Jewish roots.
Although in the decades after the war I was reluctant to visit Germany, I did build cultural and personal links and read German books. Since my retirement in 1987 I have done what I could to document my years in the public and Jewish schools and to trace childhood friends. I have visited Germany several times and get along with most people; I enjoy the scenery and feel that this country belongs to me. Like so many Canadians I have dual, though unequal, identities. I look on German history in a perspective of hundreds of years. It embraces more than just the age of the Brownshirts. Hitler could not wipe out the integral role in Austro-German culture of Heinrich Heine, Moses and Felix Mendelssohn, Karl Marx, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, Max Liebermann, Max Reinhardt, Kurt Weill, Albert Einstein and many others. Why should I not feel connected to their country? The life of Jews in Germany has seen high as well as low points. Both must be remembered, both are part of my heritage.
German Jewish liberals in my childhood
considered themselves German by nationality and ethnicity, Jewish by religion.
Along came the Nazis and said, "Once a Jew, always a Jew", the Jews cannot
be Germans. Some Jews, especially the Zionists, agreed. The division has
stuck. Many of the exiles
look at their roots too negatively, behaving as
though Hitler had won. Hitler almost defeated the Jews under his
control, but only almost. Don't we know that he lost the war, that we
are not only victims but victors? We have every reason to mourn our dead
and remember our suffering, but even more reason to celebrate our long
history with its achievements thanks to the mixture of Jewish and German
roots.
It has been said that the German-Jewish
symbiosis ["union between organisms each of which depends for its existence
on the other"-Concise Oxford Dictionary] came to a tragic end in 1933.
As Rabbi Gunther Plaut (Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 36, 1992) put it: "They
[the Jews] wanted to embrace the German spirit and failed. In the end
they returned to their own roots." Did they really fail? On German soil,
probably, but on a world perspective, the German-Jewish spirit has survived
and pervades a huge post-expulsion literature, scholarly, belletristic
and journalistic, written by writers rooted in German education: one can
see it in our writings, our teaching, our outlook on life. Even though
we have become Canadians, Americans,
British, Israelis, Latin Americans and citizens
of many other countries, with one foot most of us still stand in the homeland,
no matter that some may deny it. The Jewish refugees have transplanted
much German thought and knowledge throughout the world. It's almost like
our revenge on the Nazis: they were unable to stifle the German in us
"non-Germans."
Those who are rooted in German education
are now in our seventies or older.
After us a new generation of German Jews will take
our place. Whether they
will feel themselves as Jews in a religious or historical
sense or whether
former Christians and former Jews will have lost
a distinct identity
(intermarriage becoming the rule), all this cannot
be predicted. But a new
generation descended from Jews will assume a role
in German society,
different from the old one, vital nonetheless. The
German-Jewish spirit
will live on!
There is no sense denying this; it
always hurts me to hear my fellow exiles
talk about "them" (the) Germans and "us" Jews, as
though one necessarily
excludes the other. We were both at the same time.
In the last analysis our
identity is none but that of human beings, who like
all other human beings
are born into an environment, a culture, an age,
but we do not belong
unalterably, because of DNA or the mystique of "peoplehood,"
to one or
another community, beyond our awareness and our
daily life.
I can live very well outside a pigeon-hole,
outside an either-or identity.
I have adapted to life in Canada, but probably 80%
of the music I know and
love is German or Austrian. I enjoy a dozen other
identities-for instance,
I prefer the company of progressive persons and
I have a minor interest in
modern Jewish history. However in the last analysis
I am just myself-a
human being exposed to various societies, cultures
and countries and I can
live very well, thank you, without fitting any single
classification.