May 1 is a holiday; it is international labor day, as we know, but what is less known is that Hitler declared it a national holiday. About ten days later is mother’s day, also declared a national holiday by Hitler. Perhaps the first was meant to acknowledge the contribution of men – and the second, of women – to the national effort. In any event, this year there is violence in Hamburg as neo-Nazi demonstrators clash with left-wing protestors. In Goettingen all is quiet; everything is closed, except for a few cafes, and the streets are empty. It is an opportunity to ride around on the bike Silke leaves me on weekends, and to become more acquainted with the old town center. In the evening, an e-mail from home reminds me that it was Holocaust day there. The next day I again ride down to the center to shop for food, and am compelled first to find the memorial to the Jews who once lived here. I can see it on the map, at the intersection of Obere- and Untere-Masche-Str., and following what feels like the general direction from the supermarket I find it easily.
The design is a hexagon, six-sided. Above ground there is a sculpture made of metal-tubes that form intersecting david stars and spiral upwards, resembling a twisted fir tree. At its base on all six sides there are stairs descending into a vault, and between the stairs are concrete pillars that carry plaques. The stone floor is marked with a magen david. Standing at its center looking upward, one is within the sculpture. I feel as if I am being sucked upwards against gravity into an inverse vortex.
Looking around me I notice Hebrew letters on an engraved stone plaque. Someone has left a bunch of tulips on the ground beneath it. The Hebrew is a verse from Isaiah 54:10, and beneath it is a translation into German. The breaks in the lines of the original show that the artisan did not understand either the words or the rhythm. Beneath the quotation there are a few more lines which refer, as far as I can gather, to the synagogue that stood here until 1938 and to the date of the unveiling ceremony on 9 November 1973.
An embossed bronze plaque on the opposite wall commemorates the children, women and men from the town of Goettingen and its surroundings who perished in the dark time of 1933 to 1945, and then lists the names of these persons, as do the other plaques on the four remaining walls. I find myself counting one more time. 30 names to a column. Two columns per plaque. Four plaques full of names, and one more almost full. Total, not more than 300 people. Then I look at the years of birth. Many seem to have been born between 1860 and 1880. There are few children, that is, born from 1920 onwards, maybe ten, so the community, if it were such, seems to have been dying out anyway. The two youngest children were Eva and Ruth Barnab, born in 1931 and 1933 respectively to Dinah and Hans Barnab. So it looks like there was no more procreation after Hitler came into power.
What more can I learn from these figures? The largest family by far was named Meyerstein, with 3 generations, 25 members and 5 children. Otherwise, most of the families were small, and in most cases only one or two individuals are named. Many couples (or are they brother and sister?) had no children at all (or did they live elsewhere?). The Wertheims had three children when they were in their late thirties, including twins – Erna and Senta, born on 21 August 1922. Else Eisenstein was 33 years old when Ruth was born in 1928, and two years later came Inge. They are the only three names of this family. Was she a single mother? Or did the father die of natural causes unrelated to the Nazi genocide? The Jacobs family has the names of three men, apparently brothers (Oscar, Arno, and Julius) and one woman (Rosa), all born between 1880 and 1890. There are also two children Liselotte (b. 1919) and Hans (b. 1927). Which of the three brothers was Rosa’s husband and the father of these children? Did the other two not marry? And what were the lives of the others, the Lowenthals, the Rosenbergs, the Assers, and all the rest?
While I muse upon this lost community, trying to imagine it back into life, a group of youngsters gathers to hang out in the square. They are loud and rowdy. I cannot recognize the language they talk in, except that it is a Slavic tongue. I wonder whether they realize at all what this place is, whether they even notice me lingering there and ask or care why.
I get one more clue about the present day Jewish community from a man who attends my inaugural lecture at the Institute. He is very pedantic in presenting himself as an associate professor at the law school, as opposed to a full professor. I don’t catch his name and when I ask for it again, he says it in Hebrew and is eager to engage me in a Jewish context. He describes himself as a “racial” Jew, and explains that he is not at all religious or observant, and that his faith is humanistic. But he does not actually live in Goettingen, though he has worked at the university for over twenty years; his home is in Munich and he is a weekend commuter. As for the local community, he claimed that the information on the university website about its revival by immigrants from the former Soviet Union was rubbish; yes, there is a community, and in Hannover they would know more about it, but it is led – so he said derisively – by a late convert from Catholicism. So this matter remains an enigma.
The next weekend, in Berlin, over pizza with friends, I talk about the loneliness here, and say I cannot remember any other place in which I spent any measure of time where there was no Jewish presence. On second thought this is not entirely true – there was the summer I spent in the countryside of Piemonte, outside Turin, where I had no contact with anything Jewish. But the air was full of Finzi-Contini and Primo Levi, and there was a book shop that was owned by someone from an old Jewish family; and even though I did not seek involvement in what is left of the community, there was a feeling of some connection, identification and belonging. Here the sense of culture and continuity is lacking, and I am left in a void.
