Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Friends of mine have had a tough time with my recent naturalization as a full-fledged (albeit Texas-born) citizen of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland - the Federal Republic of Germany, the emphatically democratic successor of the Nazis’ ineffably hideous self-proclaimed “Thousand-Year Reich” - which in fact ceased to exist after only twelve, wiped out of existence by the joint military might of France, Great Britain, the USSR, and the USA.  Not only those friends have asked how in heaven’s name I can so genuinely love the same country - and my new fellow-citizens - I so passionately hated that when, at the omniscient age of twenty-five, my train from England (via the Hook of Holland) to Denmark tarried in the bombed out ruin of Hamburg’s main rail station, I demonstratively spent that half-hour or so in my third-class compartment, loath even to set foot on the soil of a nation whose every adult citizen in my perverted opinion simply had to know about Nazi Germany’s calculated cold-blooded murder of 6,000,000 - six million - Jews? - not even to mention uncountably more Sinti and Roma (then still erroniously called Gypsies), Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and of course male (but not female) homosexuals, all of them not necessarily gassed but merely worked to death as slave laborers in the concentration camps Hitler’s super-fanatic S.S. had established all over the huge European area Nazi Germany eventually occupied and enslaved.

I brought to my introductory visit to Germany an unusual background.  The New York job that first enabled me to come out of a timorous kind of wannabe writer’s closet and officially call myself a writer entailed writing scripts for two newsreels (remember pre-television newsreels?) produced every week by my employer RKO-Pathé.  An agreement with the U.S. Army Signal Corps brought us all the uncut newsfilm from all theaters of World War II, and that made me one of the first people in the country to see documentation of the concentration camps - and, even more horrific, the extermination camps - taken one after another by the advancing Allied troops. 

Confusion reigned in those late-night screening rooms.  Today virtually all reasonably well informed people interested in Nazi German history know the name of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (where those who perished included the budding Dutch writer Anne Frank), but when the first films of it arrived in New York, none of us could find it anywhere on any of the maps available in RKO-Pathé’s sizable library.  Those screenings - which went on for hours and hours and hours, not infrequently around the clock - left wounds that have not even yet completely healed, and I had those images especially fresh in my 25-year-old mind the first time my travel route forced me to pass by train through bombed-out Germany - which I hated, simply put, with a passion.

How can I love my new Heimat - my volitionally chosen new homeland - when all too frequently echoes of that horror continue to blemish it, and especially its reputation abroad, such as one this very weekend, that cropped up in the superbly preserved, tenth-century, quintessentially German town of some 26,000 souls only a short drive away from my longtime beloved adopted hometown Berlin?  You’d have to look far to find any other town in Germany today that so exemplifies the pre-war charm of this country that could match Quedlinburg.

This latest incident came to my attention Friday night as a lengthy news feature in my favorite television Kulturmagazin, called Kulturzeit, on our wonderful tri-national (Austria/Germany/Switzerland) German-language non-commercial www.3sat.de satellite network.

An Anglophone German website offers the fundamental background on last night’s conflict, which led to a head-on confrontation of about 300 irately militant anti-Nazi Germans, some of them having made a special trip to Quedlinburg to demonstrate against some 200 members of the far-right NPD, customarily referred to as neo-Nazi.  Postwar Germany’s insistence on civil rights for all citizens - as laid down in the U.S. Constitution - provides, ironically, for such political demonstrations as long as the participants respect the letter of the law about behavior.  (Speaking of letter of the law, this NPD party even gives a token nod to post-war Germany’s inexorably democratic stand, borne out by its official name: Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands.)  The British news agency Reuters has today provided this even-handed report:

“Fairytale German town fights neo-Nazis

“Christmas lights are on, policemen on a mission: To stop neo-Nazi violence.

“The Christmas market in this medieval German town could be off a page in a children’s picture book.  The sugary smell of Glühwein (mulled wine) wafts over wooden stalls selling toys and gingerbread while children sway to seasonal songs.  Christmas lights illuminate the half-timbered houses around the square.”

Last evening, Reuters reports, “three burly policemen stood under those fairy lights clutching truncheons.

“Their job: To stop neo-Nazi violence.

“Sure enough, a couple of hours later bottles started flying, a scuffle ensued, and an ambulance drew up….

“In statistics which make alarming reading given Germany’s Nazi history, right-wing-motivated violence is on the rise in the country as a whole and especially in the former east German state of Saxony-Anhalt” - which includes Quedlinburg.

A victim-support group called “Miteinander” (literally “With One Another”) has registered 110 right-wing-motivated acts of violence in the first half of this year in Saxony-Anhalt.  That was more than in any other state and compared to 129 incidents in the whole of 2005.

Police in Quedlinburg have, according to Reuters, “reacted by installing video cameras, reinforced the number of officers on night duty, launched a campaign to help the community recognize politically motivated crime, and are trying to react more quickly when incidents occur.

“‘The aim is to get quick convictions for perpetrators,’ said a police spokesperson.  He said the far-right scene was not well-organized and police know the individuals involved.”

That website has published this neo-Nazi vignette: 

The circular legend around a steel-helmeted World War II German soldier salutes “Soldiers of the world - you were the best.”

“The UNESCO World Heritage site of Quedlinburg”, Reuters continues, “counts as one of Germany’s prettiest towns.  According to folklore, the nearby Harz mountain range is home to witches and woodland spirits.

“But during the day, it is the neo-Nazis who make their presence felt.

“Hanging around the square, they are recognizable by their skinhead haircuts, military clothing with far-right slogans like “Stahlgewitter” (storm of steel) and Burberry [!] caps.”

You can read that unabridged report by clicking here. 

Subsidized theater flourishes throughout Germany, even in comparatively small cities.  One such regional theater, the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater in nearby Halberstadt, only a short distance away from Quedlinburg, rose up in wrath after the NPD announced plans for last night’s rally in Quedlinburg.  The theater’s website announced a counter-demonstration called “Auf die Plätze!” (appoximately “Into Position!”) exhorting the populace to protest en masse against the neo-Nazis virtually nextdoor.

This morning’s news carried detailed reports of what happened. 

Several hundred policemen took fourteen rightist demonstrators into custody and expelled seventy-three.  Those fourteen wound up in the slammer, nine of them under what German law calls preventive arrest, with five charged with “bearing forbidden objects” (presumably weapons of some kind) and violators of laws concerning disguises, with further legal processes against them still pending.

The Halberstadt group that had come to the aid of Quedlinburg’s anti-Nazi forces called itself the Runde Tisch Quedlinburg, the Quedlinburg Round Table.  It comprised a variety of anti-fascist groups, clubs and associations, labor unions, political parties, churches, and individuals, all of them determined to make clear to the NPD that they have no place in Quedlinburg.

The pro-democratic counter-demonstration started at 10 a.m., with public speeches in front of Quadlinburg’s little railroad station.  Four hours later, when the Kirchspiel Quedlinburg bells rang out as usual to call the faithful to prayers in the Market Church, all the bells in town joined in that tintinnabulation as signal for all Quedlinburgers to assemble in the central marketplace.  Sympathizers from Wernigerode, Osterwieck, and other nearby settlements who had no cars of their own or driver’s licences got bus transportation for a token one-Euro fare, in either direction; that theater’s homepage published comprehensive details.  At the Golden Pump tavern, the local fire brigade served free beer.  Over in Halberstadt, tramlines served all night long, gratis, for both nights in succession.

Do I take all this seriously? 

Damned right I do - but I also take heart in a number of factors involved.  Most importantly, especially for me as what my new fellow citizens here call a freshly baked German, those ordinary German citizens who spontaneously formed and backed that Quedlinburg Round Table splendidly represent my Germany, the Germany I’ve gradually come to know better and better, which has given me so much during the fifty-six years since I first moved from Paris to Munich, and which I’ve come to love so gratefully and sincerely.