Life and Death at the Brandenburg Gate

On Saturday, August 2nd, 2008, my son Gabriel was Bar Mitzvah’d in the village of Baumgarten, approximately 45 minutes north of Berlin.

The previous evening, on Friday, my wife and I organized a special event.  We walked with family, friends, and invited guests, under and through the Brandenburg Gate.  What follows is an explanation of the symbolic importance of that monument in our lives.

My mother’s parents, Rudolf and Gretl (Rosenthal) Meyerfeld were driven from Germany on Krystalnacht, November 9, 1938.  They were among the fortunate few who escaped, though among the survivors of Nazi terror their story is sadly unremarkable.

Rudy’s father, my great-grandfather Max Meyerfeld, was a veteran of the first world war, and a successful trader in Cologne.  Like so many secular Jews of his time, he discounted and disbelieved the then-threatening storm of violence.  Indeed, he persisted in his denial even after Rudy’s sister, Lotte, for whom I am named (my second name is Lawrence) was murdered with her husband in Prague for belonging to the resistance.  Rudy was the only surviving member of his large extended clan.

Gretl’s family was more fortunate. Her brothers had already sought their fortunes outside Germany;  one brother landed in Buenos Aires, the other, Kurt, in Pittsburgh.  Kurt changed his name from Rosenthal to Rose, joined the American Army during the second world war, and subsequently made his living as an artisan of prosthetics.  I followed him to Pittsburgh, aged eighteen in 1979, nearly fifty years after he first arrived, to study at Carnegie Mellon University.  I went there because his son, Andy, who is Gabriel’s godfather, and my “big brother”, went there.

My mother was born on December 1, 1938, just two weeks after my grandparents narrow nighttime escape, as they watched Hamburg burn behind them, and a few days after they cleared Ellis Island to begin a hardscrabble life in New York City.  Her first language was German, which she spoke exclusively until she began public school, and which she spoke with her parents and siblings at home.  Unfortunately, she never spoke it to me.  The German I know was learned as a young adult in Munich, while I was working for Prof. Dr. Hans Steinbigler, who has been my mentor and friend for twenty years.

In 1988 I completed my studies at CMU, and was invited by Prof. Steinbigler for my post-doctoral training at the Technical University of Munich.  I immediately accepted his offer because at that time, forty years after the end of the Third Reich and the beginning of stable social democracy in Germany, I believed – as I to still today – that it was imperative upon my generation to actively create open connections between Jews and Germans.  And so I arrived in Munich in that February, much to the chagrin and anxiety of my parents, family, and my Jewish community.  Already this decision ruptured several relationships among kinsmen who, still, can not reconcile themselves to the reality of modern Germany.  Nonetheless, it was a profoundly important and positive choice.

In April of 1988, during my post-doc in Munich, my mother joined me for a ten day visit in Germany, and we took our first-ever trip to Berlin, then still artificially divided by the concrete slabs of the “protective” wall.  Together, we crossed to East Berlin, and walked to the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, absorbing occasional cross words and hostile looks of the border guards.  As we approached the structure from the east, she turned to me, and in uncharacteristic statement of political defiance, promised me that she would one day “walk all the way through”. Twenty years ago, in the springtime of 1988, when she was not yet 50 years old, this seemed an unlikely proposition.

But her prediction was more prescient, and more poignant, than even professional diplomats and foreign policy experts could have possibly known;  hardly nineteen months later the wall came down, and her geopolitically impossible dream was, in principle, feasible and realistic.  She only had to go back to Berlin.

And in early 1993 my mother did return to the city, then for the second time.  She was on a business trip to recruit young university students to teach as native speaking instructors in a German-language elementary school in Kansas City Missouri; she had become their principal just a few months before.  Near the end of her visit, on March 21, she woke up early for the short drive, from the President Hotel near the 17th of June Strasse, to the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, intending to walk to the spot where we had stood together on the east side five years before.

She did not complete her journey.  My mother, Evelyn Ann Levin, died suddenly of a heart attack, with my sister at her side, across the street from the monument.  She was 54 years old.

By then I was married to Klaudia Lechner, the daughter of a German foot soldier, who I met during my first stay in Munich.   Her father, Hans, to whom I became very close, fought with General Rommel in the deserts of Egypt, and was captured and held in dire conditions as a prisoner of war.  He was one of the lucky ones (his brother had already died on the Eastern Front) – he was sent to Canada, where he lived in a camp for nearly seven years before returning home to Ansbach in 1947, where he married Margaret Beck, and raised a family of six children.

Klaudia and I have two children, Jakob and Gabriel, who we have raised according to Jewish customs and social values.  Gabriel, born in Germany during my sabbatical year as a Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University of Darmstadt, turned 13 last year, and, as I mentioned above, was welcomed according to tradition as an adult into our community on the morning of August 2, 2008.

The evening before, on Friday August 1, in a symbol of continued reconciliation between the German Diaspora and modern Germany, in memory of the millions of families who did not escape the brutal regime, and, last but not least, in honor of my mother’s unfilled journey under the monument of now-fulfilled hope, we organized a brief candlelight ceremony, and walked across the street, under and through the Brandenburg gate.

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The next day, we held the ceremony in a renovated barn in the small village of Baumgarten.  Here is the message I gave to Gabriel that day:

Baumgarten, August 2, 2008

My dear son, Gabriel,

Today we celebrate together, as our ancestors before us, the once-ordinary ceremony that marks the natural transition from child to adult. Our family and close friends have gathered in your honor, to welcome and encourage you in the first steps of your adult life.

Of course our ceremony today is anything but ordinary. In living memory of many people who join us are the echoes of a dark and brutal time, when life was not precious, and when civil justice was arbitrary, prejudiced, and unimaginably harsh. A Bar Mitzvah in Germany, only sixty years later, even sixty years later, is like new growth in the forest after a wildfire. With this unconventional celebration, we make an abiding statement of solidarity with our common history, our shared faith, and our unshakable confidence in your future. The peaceful exercise of our freedom is today the fragile privilege of this place. You are the beautiful new life. We are all blessed.

Some may ask “how can this be”? How can a child whose mother is not Jewish become a Bar Mitzvah? How can we welcome this young boy of thirteen into the Jewish community in such an unconventional way, without perfect adherence to the holy laws of the Torah, in a barn and not a synagogue, primarily in German, and with half the children of Bonn? We have talked about these questions many times. (At least dinner will be Kosher.)

You know what we believe: to be Jewish is to find your own path to truth, of learning and knowledge, of compassion and strength. Judaism is about reverence for books and study, about integrity and tolerance, and about staying on that path against all challenges, crises, and hazards. The Jewish tradition is a tradition of courage, of facing lethal danger without flinching, of clarity of thought and purpose, and of unrelenting focus.

On second thought: I should be careful about advising you to be “unrelenting” about anything. Never mind that one. This won’t be an issue for you. Just keep working on the focus part. It’ll be good enough.

Many people have come to your Bar Mitzvah who you’ve never met before, or don’t know very well. Why is that? Of course, there aren’t as many Bar Mitzvahs in Berlin as there are in Boston, and the structure, ritual, and message of the service is universally attractive – in English we’d say “little c catholic”. And there aren’t many examples of parties that people have thrown non-stop for almost six thousand years. The ancient history of the Bar Mitzvah is alone so interesting, and so important, that people outside the religion want to learn more about it, and to see it once for themselves.

But I think there’s more to it.

Our country, the United States, has made some terrible mistakes recently, mistakes we should have been able to avoid if we had better understood other people’s history, beliefs, and their legitimate ambitions. We would have avoided these mistakes if we had done a better job of attending to the forest of freedom, liberty, and choice, and not the desert of ideology, superstition, ignorance, and lies.

One day, the thirteen year old boy who today lives in Iraq, or Afghanistan, who looks like you and whose parents and brother love him as much as we do you, who is as smart, as funny, as gifted, and as hopeful as you are, one day he will welcome his son, like we welcome you, into a world of opportunity and fantastic challenge. His child, like mine, will have access to fresh food and water, secular education, modern medicines, and impartial justice. But today he lives in a dangerous place, denied of all what we would consider ordinary and normal.

Not long ago, Germany was that place. And this is why we return to Baumgarten: not to reclaim what was taken by force of violence, but to reclaim what is ours by strength of spirit.

There are many people here today who have flown across an ocean for you and only for you. Many of them, our family – David and Eliot, the Leopolds – and people who are like family – Per, Gert and Marzenna, Al and Kate, the Serebrenikovs - have never or only rarely been to Germany. And they would have come anywhere in the world to be at your Bar Mitzvah. The Lechner clan, of course, would have eagerly joined us in Jerusalem or in Jakarta, as well as many of our friends for whom Berlin was a long car ride away.

But there are some friends in attendance who don’t know you that well, and who are to participate in this strong statement of connection. They, like us, are not responsible for what happened in Germany during the Nazi reign of terror. They, like us, cannot stop today’s war, feed today’s hungry, save millions from ignorance, poverty, and civil violence. And, still, it was important for them to come. Why?

I believe they came because coming to a Bar Mitzvah enables them to reclaim, too, what was lost to Germany many years ago: the rich tradition, the magnificent culture, and, yes, the loud personality of Judaism. By being here they say, “yes, there is hope for reconciliation, hope for tolerance, hope for peace”. Sometimes words are not enough. By coming here they say to you, Gabriel, “don’t take this freedom for granted”. Know that one day it will be your responsibility to share in its protection, and to teach it to your children.

How will you do that? Only G-d knows.

Perhaps one day you will have the opportunity to travel to Afghanistan and Iraq as I have travelled to Germany and Vietnam, and meet the boy who is today thirteen in those countries. And maybe you will be part of the next generation that brings peace and understanding to places that today are torn by war and intolerance, and maybe you will do that by having your son’s Bar Mitzvah there.