Simone Zelitch - Judenstaat

One morning, I was lying in bed with my husband, and I said, What if a Jewish state had been established in Germany after the war?

The very idea was a provocation. Yet I continued to consider: If Theodor Herzl was right when he wrote Der Judenstaat in 1896, and the only answer to what he called the Jewish Question was a Jewish state, then what if that state had been established as a kind of national project of reparation and even retribution for the Holocaust? How would that shape its history and a politics and national character? I think I speculated out loud for a whileits that kind of marriageand then my husband went to brush his teeth, returned, and said, What about the Soviet Union?

What about the Soviet Union? It existed. So did Stalin, who might have had his own plans for a Jewish homeland; he had created one called Birobidjan and slaughtered most of its inhabitants in purges. What about East Germany? It didnt exist, or more precisely, this country would encompass much of its territory, though its borders, I decided, would be those of Saxony, east of Berlin. And yes, theres a wall; it keeps out German fascists. The story begins in 1987. The wall is about to fall.

There is no single model for Judenstaat, though a reader will quickly find some parallels: two nationsIsrael and East Germanyfounded within a year and a half of each other. Both nations claimed to be a response to fascism, a way to move beyond tragedy and to rebuild ruined lives. Judenstaat borrows freely from the trajectory of both countries, with periods of postwar renewal, isolation, suppression, upheaval, and liberalization. A rough timeline appears at the end of this book. As a fortieth anniversary of my country approached, surely it would be time for a historical reckoning.

In constructing what follows, I couldnt help but consider the nature of counterhistories, like Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle, a novel that considers what would have happened had Germany and Japan won the Second World War and goes beyond the thought-experiment to look at the fragile nature of history itself. Then I was led, inevitably, to Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, a vision of a future where the past can shift depending on who writes the story.

There is no answer to the Holocaustor as they say in Yiddish, the Churban. There is no single answer to the Jewish Question. We keep on asking question after question. Perhaps the question that most shaped what youre about to read is not national, but personal: What happens when you lose everything, but have to go on living? Who do you become?

We all know suffering is real. But in the end, all countries are imaginary.

GERMANY was the birthplace of Jewish culture. A thousand years ago, we planted roots in Ashkenaz that flowered and brought forth the fruit of the Enlightenment embodied by the fabled Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason.

THE CATASTROPHEthe great CHURBANwhich recently befell the Jews of Europe has demonstrated with new urgency that THE RIGHT OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO A HOME IN GERMANY IS IRREVOCABLE.

WE DECLARE that from this moment, the 14th of May 1948, under the establishment of Allied Forces, that the German territory once designated Saxony will henceforth be JUDENSTAAT.

PLACING OUR TRUST in the future, we affix our signatures to this proclamation, and commence with our national project. The very place we faced our death is where well build our lives.

Thus, the ghosts of 1948 surface on the editing machine in black and white montage: washed out faces of survivors, signatures on a declaration, flat-bed trucks, a lot of rubble. No audio. Given all the footage Judit had to edit for the Fortieth Anniversary Project, it was easy to roll through the film and make her cuts. And somehow, she was supposed to find something explosively prophetic, something worth keeping. Not this old stuff. The heavy feeder cut and spliced, and the cells floated somewhere else.

But those cells werent the specter haunting Judit. It was her husbands ghost. That specter stretched its long legs on a work bench, and leaned in to watch her. Its gray eyes were assessing.

Judit said, I know what Im doing. There had been a time when shed been too self-conscious to address the ghost, but Hans had been haunting her for three years.

The ghost of Hans Klemmer never spoke, but its presence worked on her as sharply as her living husbands. It engaged her in a phantom conversation. It didnt like those cuts; it took a hard line against editing. It noticed things she didnt, like cells littering the floor, and it took stock of those cells as though she were an executioner. Every time she cut a frame, she slit a throat.

It isnt what theyre after, Judit said. Everyones seen the footage of the signing back in secondary school. How could silence not feel like rebuke? She could only say, I dont have time for this. Im on a deadline.

But Hans was dead. Maybe she could shake off Hans Klemmers specter like a sinus headache. She kept a box of aspirin in a drawer and took two now. That helped sometimes.

And sometimes not. Why did Hans haunt her in the archive? She never saw the ghost anywhere else. The specter should have haunted the Opera House, where hed been murdered. It would create a public spectacle. Isnt that what specters are supposed to do? To the extent that one could be rational about a ghost, she found its presence difficult to fathom.

Worse, it kept staring, judging. The living Hans had loved her, and this ghost had her husbands form, but it never touched her. It just stared. Did she want it to go away? It made things difficult. She said, How can I work when you look at me like that?

That was Judits question to answer. After all, she was the archivist. Hans was just history. At least he was now.

They were still naming things after him, the Klemmer Regional Concert Hall, Klemmer Memorial Park, and so on. Because Hans died on Liberation Day, every May 14th he was remembered. Then there was the statue of him by the Opera House, with the wavy hair, the baton, and the flying coattails. The first time Judit saw the ghost, shed thought it was another statue that someone put in the archive as a joke, but who would hate her that much? Then the statue moved its head and yawned. Shed dropped her coffee.

That was the trouble. There was what some clever historian might call cognitive dissonance between Hans and Hans, between the noble statue and the ghost. And there would always be the statue because of how hed died, three months after hed been appointed Judenstaats first Saxon conductor.

The occasion was momentous. To have this ethnic Germanorphaned in 46raise his baton before the premiere orchestra of the Jewish state in celebration of its liberation by the Soviets, how could it help but feel like one of those ruptures that draws a line between one age and another?

The national anthem sounded new again: