While You Were Here

I really don’t like reading about the holocaust and dread watching films about it – documentary or otherwise.  Even the testimonies of witnesses fill me with apprehension. Oversaturated with ‘never forget’, ‘never again’, and broad-stroke portraits of good, evil and in-between, we still witness other holocausts and forget that more recent generations have nothing to remember.  We are too young. We try to know, but how do you tell the story so it matters?

To anyone who wonders just how the hell it all happened, Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 is all you need.  It reads like a novel, or the best historical fiction if you’re into that sort of thing, albeit one where you might wonder ‘who would make this stuff up?’ It is a moving yet unemotional history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany that manages to be engaging, visual (you can see the film playing in your mind as you read), and never dull. Elon puts it all in a social & cultural context too often absent from other accounts. Oh, and it’s all true.  This is a history book for people who hate history books.

On the occasion of Elon’s death last week, The New Yorker published an elegant essay by his friend Bernard Avishai.  I recommend reading the whole essay, but there was one part that inspired me to write this post.  Avishai provides a nuanced explanation of Elon’s outlook on the nature of human beings:

Amos could not get over how history went wrong because of the ways in which broken-hearted people act together and ricochet off one another, how qualities that we ordinarily like in people—creativity, loyalty, sincerity, steadfastness—combine to create disasters; how human desires, whose details only a compassionate observer can describe, explain everything, including how we routinely throw happiness away.

Is this love gone wrong or the state of Palestinian/Israeli relations?  It could be either (he goes on to quote Elon from an essay on the latter). And that’s the genius of Elon and The Pity of It All. With this humanistic view, he pushes History onto our shoulders, small human shoulders that bear the consequences of wants and desires so poorly pursued. Our histories – individually and collectively – rely on our ability to mitigate the breaking of hearts.  When we fail, all hell breaks loose.

While You Were Here centers on the friendship between my grandmother and Hans ‘Kino’ Frank, and by extension the relationships between religions, classes, and political parties in a southwestern German village. If it is true that our human desires can explain everything, then the desires of the people in this village may explain the course of events in a way that makes them more understandable, closer to ourselves, and that much harder to ignore.

Something always slips.  Pieces are missing.   Images without sound.  Sound without images.  People whose names I was told and forgot.  Whose stories, so pixellated through time and retelling, barely resemble their origins.  And there are photos like this:  A relative without a name.

In an album full of portraits of relatives of my great grandfather, Moritz Marx,  only 2 people are named.  The rest are unknown but presumably related to me and each other.  I admit there is a desire to know who they are, but couldn’t say exactly why. Curiosity, yes, but to what end?  Does it matter if I know where he lived, whether he was married, had children, died young or old, from illness, age or violence?

Yes:  that knowledge connects us to history and shapes how we see ourselves in the world.  No: in spite of our dna this is a stranger, as much as any I might pass on the street today.  Maybe I wouldn’t even like him.

The names are missing because, well, really – do your photo albums have everyone’s names in them? Even yours? Online photo sharing & tagging may change that but for now it still leaves out a good many photo albums of the world. I think, like us, they – these ancestors -  just assumed their family knowledge would be handed down one way or another.  Were they more connected to each other than we are now? For all our social networking, maybe.

To the boy in the picture, social networking probably looked something more like this:

This elderly woman is remembering, and telling what she recalls to local historian, Gerhard Holzer. Gerhard has been researching Jewish families of Flonheim (where the Marx family is from) and other small villages nearby, collecting stories from the handful of elderly people left to tell them.  He is a major character in the film and you’ll see/read more about him here.  On November 9th 2008, he led a walking tour through Flonheim identifying the houses where Jewish families once lived, sharing stories he has learned through his research.  In the middle of the tour, this tiny old woman came out in the rain and started to talk.  Riveted, we listened as she quietly took over the tour for as long as her memory permitted.

Recently, I realized I did not have her name and wanted more details about her as I would like to include her scene in the film.  Gerhard told me that she is Annemarie Lehn.  And that she died just weeks ago.  Fortunately he had captured some of her stories in his notes. And I have some on videotape.  The rest, including the names that may not appear in her photo albums, just slipped through.