It would be an exaggeration, however, to speak, as some Berliners did, of a “renaissance” of Jewish life in the once and future German capital. The Berlin Jewish contingent’s size, while impressive by postwar German standards, was but a shadow of the 160,000-strong community of the 1920s. As before, Berlin’s Jews were sharply divided between more established residents and new arrivals from the east. Many of the Russian-Jewish newcomers (in contrast to the Ostjuden a century earlier) were less interested in cultivating Jewish traditions than in integrating themselves as fast as possible into German society. In 1997 a much-publicized quarrel between two political factions within the local Jewish community became so embittered that Ignaz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called in a CDU politician from Frankfurt, Michel Friedman, to try to end the embarrassing “mud-fight” in Berlin. The city’s political establishment, meanwhile, did little to assist newly arrived Jewish artists in their efforts to rebuild a viable cultural scene. As Der Spiegel observed: “Apparently no local politician has gotten it into his head that the unexpected and undeserved opportunity to revive Germany’s Jewish cultural heritage requires special attention.”
Rather than promoting a living Jewish culture, Berlin cultivated a nostalgia for the lost era of pre-Nazi Jewish vitality. Oranienburger Strasse, once lined with Jewish businesses, now became a kind of Jewish theme park. In addition to the New Synagogue, of which only the dome and front section—not the main sanctuary—were restored, there was an upscale kosher restaurant where tourists in search of an authentic Jewish experience could eat vegetarian blintzes and listen to piped-in klezmer music. A building nearby bore the sign, Kleiderfabrikation Goldstein, the work of a film crew making a TV movie about Jüdisches Berlin. Across the street stood a picturesquely dilapidated structure which had been turned into an avant-garde art center called Tacheles—Yiddish for “straight talking.” The building in question had opened in 1909 as one of those grand iron and glass arcades that so fascinated turn-of-the-century flaneurs. In the 1920s it had served as an exhibition hall for futurist products made by the German Electric Company. Allied bombs and East German neglect had reduced it to a sagging hulk. The artists who “occupied” the place in 1990 with the battle cry, “Ideals are ruined, so we’ll save the ruins,” drew generous subsidies from the Berlin Senate. By the mid-1990s Tacheles had become a not-so-secret “secret tip” in all the guidebooks. A restaurant on the ground floor called “Café Zapata” promised a taste of the Mexican revolution, Berliner-Szene style, to package-tour groups bussed in from all over Europe.
Although generally welcoming its new Jewish residents, Berlin witnessed a number of anti-Semitic incidents in the years following the fall of the Wall. Neo-Nazis vandalized headstones in Jewish cemeteries and painted Juden Raus! on synagogues (which eventually were placed under twenty-four-hour police guard). Skinhead thugs declared that it was intolerable that Berlin, the “capital of the German Reich,” should once again be attracting Jews from other parts of Europe. These actions were part of a much larger wave of right-wing antiforeigner violence washing over reunited Germany. In the fall of 1991 a group of skinheads, cheered on by local residents, attacked Vietnamese and Mozambican workers in a housing project in Hoyerswerda (in the former GDR). In the following summer thugs beat Gypsies and attacked the residents of an asylum center in the eastern port of Rostock. Many West Germans attributed these incidents to the postunification frustrations of the East Germans, but even worse outrages occurred in the “old states”: the firebombing of a house in Mölln, near Hamburg, that killed a Turkish woman and her niece and granddaughter; the attack on a Turkish residence in Solingen that killed five women and children from a family who had been living in West Germany for twenty-five years.
Tacheles Art Center in Oranienburger Strasse
