Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Two dear old unmarried sisters, who live two floors above me and have spent most of their lives in this Wilmersdorf section of Berlin, much of it in this house, recently called my attention to nearby locations associated with the pre-emigration years of Marlene Dietrich, so this afternoon I finally got around to making a little Marlene pilgrimage, with the original intention of writing about that here.  Meanwhile, though, something else has confiscated my attention, a topic of particular interest to me (cf. my book Die Freiheit zum Tode (Rowohlt Verlag, 1973 - published only in German), literally the freedom to die, which I’d originally entitled Death Is Not the Worst, borrowed from Sophocles’ tragedy Elektra: “Death is not the worst; rather, in vain / To wish for death, and not to compass it.”  (If my book interests you, apparently a total of forty-three copies remain available at http://tinyurl.com/yq5djq.)

On June 16, 1996 in Mahlow, a village (pop. 4,900) in the formerly East German state of Brandenburg (which surrounds the city-state Berlin), two local neo-Nazi thugs, 17 and 24, took exception to their foreign neighbor Noel Martin, and savagely attacked him with the evident intention of killing him.  They took exception to Martin’s black skin (a British national, he originally came from Jamaica), almost certainly even more specifically to the fact that Martin, who had found work in Mahlow as a construction worker, had also found true love and a happy marriage to a lily-white local girl.  Last September, the Anglophone version of Germany’s crackerjack weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported this from Birmingham:

“Noel Martin plans to take his own life in less than a year.  Just over 10 years ago, a neo-Nazi attack left him paralyzed from the neck down.  He plans to fight right-wing extremists to the very end. 

“Noel Martin has only 297 days left. But time, he says, is also limited for the neo-Nazis who ruined his life.

“Noel Martin has already chosen July 23, 2007 to be the day he dies” - his 48th birthday.  “On that evening, his pulse will gradually slow down until it stops completely.  He has decided to die as a result of a lethal blend of drugs — administered in Switzerland by Dignitas, an organization that offers its clients medically assisted suicide.”  (You can read that entire Spiegel account by clicking here.)

In June 1996, I had returned to Berlin the previous autumn from the worst single mistake of my entire life - thirteen ill-starred years back in my country of origin, twelve of those in San Francisco - and as an incurable news junky I naturally paid almost masochistically close attention to the Noel Martin tragedy - for several intertwined reasons.  My parents both had originally come from Mississippi, and I can still hear my father’s voice telling in El Paso how southern friends - or so he claimed - had no intention of attending the World’s Fair back in the 1930s scheduled for Chicago, ”up there where they call a nigger Mister.”  My early years turned me into a lifelong militant anti-racist, a Weltanshauung that in time got turned inside out, so to speak: I first came to Germany fifty-one years ago inexorably convinced of the unatonable guilt of every living German, only to have a concatenation of corrective therapeutic experiences during the intervening decades turn me into an unconventional kind of anti-racist: one ready to come out swinging whenever I encounter anyone showing indications of what I have come to lump together as blanket, knee-jerk anti-German racism.

Tonight Noel Martin turned up here on Kulturzeit, my favorite Kulturmagazin five times weekly on our consistently high-class tri-national German-language TV network (non-commercial, naturally) called 3sat, for Austria, Germany, and Switzerland - for today, according to his original plan, he had looked forward to finally dying.

Well, he hasn’t changed his mind; he has, though, postponed his anticipated rendezvous with Death.  Kulturzeit quoted him as saying he still has a number of loose ends he wants to tie up.  To quote that account: “Much remains to get into order, especially property questions connected with his house and the lot where his wife lies buried and where he wants to be buried in the near future.  ‘What others can take care of in two days takes me two weeks’, Martin says.”

And those two savage neo-Nazi punks who came so close to killing him?  To quote the Spiegel once again: “Two young Germans, Sandro R. and Mario P. [German law prohibits publication of under-age defendants' full names], had thrown a lump of concrete at Martin’s car.  They were 17 and 24 years old at the time and their motive was ‘explicit xenophobia,’ as a court later determined.  They were sentenced to five and eight years in prison.  Noel Martin never got an apology, but by now he doesn’t care any more.  ‘It would be a waste of time.  God will take care of them,” he says, “life will take care of them.”  Both of his attackers are now free.  [Their own skins must set some sort of record for thickness, for after serving their prison terms they returned to Mahlow, the scene of their almost lethal crime.]  But Martin is still imprisoned — in his own body.”

No doubt you’d have preferred for me to write today’s contribution here about something more pleasant, like for instance Marlene Dietrich, but when material like this ambushes me I turn into the incorrigible old fire-horse reacting to the sound of the firehouse-bell.  I haven’t relinquished my original idea of writing about my own two brief but personal encounters with Dietrich, one when she returned to Berlin for the first time since leaving it for Hollywood in 1932, where Hitler’s rise to power decided her to stay, and one in Edinburgh at her first meeting with the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter, with me one of only five persons present in The George Hotel’s almost totally darkened dining room around three a.m. - fairly rich material I’ll get around to just a.s.a. conveniently p.