When past meets present: A reflection on Germany Close Up

Berlin is, in many ways, a typical city. If I hadn’t been there on a Jewish trip, it might have been easy for me to forget the city’s past.

Berlin is typical in that it’s a large capital city of a large country, and it’s very international. But when I visited Berlin on the Germany Close Up trip with the Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, we focused on Jewish history in Berlin and the current situation of Jews in Berlin.

I toured a typical city, but I also saw much more. I saw a city where the past informs so much about the present. I saw a city with many uncomfortable and ugly aspects in its past and a city which, to a certain extent, has a difficult time grappling with that past.

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I expected to feel a big impact from standing in the same places where many terrible things — and some triumphant ones, too — happened. Maybe it’s just me, but that impact was small.

The bigger impact was from the stories.

When we went on a Jewish walking tour of Berlin, it was the stories that got to me. When we visited Ravensbrück, a former concentration camp, the stories of torture, suffering, resistance and rightousness were what made me think about and feel things about the past.

I felt most connected to the past by people and stories, not architecture. Being in the physical locations certainly helped me to learn about and experience modern-day Jewish life in Berlin — but it did not contribute to the gut-punch feelings I got.

When I saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with its varying gray blocks arranged mostly in a grid, I didn’t know how to feel. Solemn, for sure, but what else? That ambiguity is very much by design, and important in its own way. But, underneath the memorial, in the exhibit space, when I heard stories of Jews who barely survived the Holocaust and those who didn’t, I knew exactly how to feel. I rooted for the protagonists and hoped life would work out for them. Far too often, it didn’t.

Each year at the Jewish day school I attended, we heard a Holocaust survivor speak and we discussed the importance of remembering the past and learning from it. I was constantly told that my generation would be the last to hear directly from Holocaust survivors. My teachers would say this was ever more important because of increasing Holocaust denialism and minimalism. Young me figured Holocaust denial was merely a fringe phenomenon — and in the sense that it’s totally divorced from reality, it is fringe. But it’s also surprisingly common, and worries about that popped up constantly.

One of the motifs that appeared again and again during the trip was the state of the present-day Jewish community in Berlin and Germany. These communities are comprised mostly of recent immigrants predominantly from the former Soviet Union, Israel and the United States. The fact that they are immigrants, though, isn’t a barrier between the past and present: There’s one big Jewish family, and in many ways one big Jewish story.

In fact, many of the issues facing Jews from the far-right in Germany are related to a desire by many to cut funding for Holocaust education and memorials. But people are fighting back, including the local Jewish community. My visit to the Jewish library in Berlin — the largest Jewish library in Europe — was notable because I was empowered to see how Berlin’s modern-day Jewish community preserved hundreds of books from the past.

I wanted to conclude this piece by reconciling the relationship between the past and present, to reduce it to one interesting takeaway. Something about how people in the present are fighting to ensure we respect, remember and learn from the past, even as others make that difficult. And that’s a good point to make. But I’d also like to leave unresolved the sense of unease I got by the past itself, how the present is shaped by the past, and how we in the present respond. We all know the past is complicated, intricate and tough to think about. As Jews, no wonder our relationship to the past is all those things. PJC

Christopher Lessler is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in business administration at Carnegie Mellon University.