Jonathan Garfinkel – Jewcy

Sebald, Stuttgart and an Unexpected Letter

Jonathan Garfinkel — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 04:55:25 +0000

I received a note in my mailbox today from a friend. I want to post part of it because it is about a street not far from where I’m living right now. Included with the letter (in the mailbox) was a roughly photocopied Yiddish newspaper:

Here’s a part of the Yiddish newspaper I told you about at the Weindorf. Sorry for the bad quality of the copy and my scribbling; I hope you can still read it. The paper has never been transcribed or published after 1945 and has probably never been read outside of the camp in the Reinsburgstrasse where it was published in Dec. 1945. In this camp around 1500 mainly Polish Jews lived from `45, after being freed from concentration camps, until around 1950. The atmosphere between the German population of Stuttgart and the Jewish DPs must have been quite tense, culminating in a raid by the German police and the US military police in March 1946. In the raid, Szmul Danzyger, who survived Auschwitz and only returned from Paris the day before to see his family again for the first time, was killed by a shot in the head.

Included with the Yiddish newspaper is a speech made by W.G. Sebald to the Literature House in Stuttgart in 2001, not long before he died (the speech was published in the December 20th, 2004 issue of the New Yorker). In this speech, Sebald, a German-born writer who lived in England the last thirty years of his life, deftly leaps from his own past into the larger German past of the poet Hoderlin (who wrote about Stuttgart on several occasions in the 18th century) to the post-war event described above to a postcard he found at the Salvation Army store in Manchester. The postcard is a remarkable Sebald moment: typically in his writing it’s these little details of history that reveal so much. The postcard is from a British girl visiting Stuttgart only weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. She writes that she’s met amiable people in Stuttgart and that she has “been out tramping, sunbathing and sightseeing, to a German birthday party, to the pictures and to a festival of the Hitler Youth.” What I love about Sebald is his obsession with history: how the past is never far from us, is somehow still happening, repeating itself like a dream (or nightmare). Sebald not only wrote about these things, but his writing somehow captures the feeling of memory invading us at unexpected moments. I’ve noticed it here, felt it when walking down a street in Stuttgart, now glossed over, now clean and even and orderly. Walk down Reinsburgstrasse to buy some bread, to visit the doctor, and an image might come to me of rubble, homelessness, devastation. I look into the faces of old people and wonder what they were doing sixty years ago; the kinds of choices they made in a reality I can barely fathom. Were they here when Szmul Danzyger was killed? Then the thought occurs to me that even though Germany has rebuilt its cities so well, somewhere the shooting of Szmul Danzyger is still happening, be it in Sudan or Afghanistan or Gaza or Georgia. I think this walking down Reinsburgstrasse or Marienstrasse or Konigstrasse, among the shopping malls and Turkish kebab stalls and art museums: the fires of history are constantly ablaze, and they’re fueled by human suffering. And the mind remembers this suffering, keys into it in unexpected moments: sometimes as dream, sometimes as literature, sometimes as a letter left in a box.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, spent the last week guest-blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy his book!

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For Germans, Schvitz Is A Science

Jonathan Garfinkel — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:20:36 +0000

Well, it’s a foggy day here at the Castle. Perfect opportunity to head to the Mineralbad in Stuttgart. While Bochum is one of the ugliest cities in Europe, Stuttgart is only moderately ugly. Mostly destroyed during the war, it has rebuilt itself as one of the wealthiest cities in Germany thanks to the Mercedes plant located nearby. And you see it on your way in: everyone has a car, usually a pretty swank and sleek one specially designed for the infamous German autobahn. At first it seems like there isn’t a lot to do in Stuttgart. But dig a little deeper, and I find the city growing on me. They have a few nice cafes, some surprisingly good Eritrean restaurants, and the delightful local Schwabian food – famous for its egg noodles with cheese, i.e., kase spaetzle. Stuttgart has some of the best opera and ballet in Europe, an excellent theatre house, and some great designer clothing stores. But my favourite thing to do in Stuttgart is to go to the Leuze Mineral baths. The Leuze is done in a hideous 70s design – two giant baby blue lightning bolts come out of the roof to announce that you’re here. It’s on the Neckar River, across from an ancient amusement park and the zoo. This ain’t no sauna in the Redwoods in California. But no matter. Because what’s inside is absolutely fantastic. The German Sauna experience is not at all like a North American visit to the local JCC or YMCA. First of all, clothing is not an option. I learned this my first day when I was taken by a female friend of mine. I entered the sauna in my bathing suit to find 40 other fat and not-so fat men and women crammed onto the benches. A rather large elderly gentleman leaned over to me and snickered in German, “Bathing suits are for the pool.” Germans like being naked and the sauna is a good example of their comfort with the body. It certainly isn’t a sexual experience; it’s simply too bloody hot to check other people out (though when I went with my African-American friend, Sanford, there were a few curious eyes turned his way). What is great about Leuze is there are 7 different dry saunas, each of varying size, temperature and lighting. And the reason why I am now officially addicted, and go week after week for my two hours of sauna, is the German Aufguss. The Aufguss is a somewhat masochistic event that involves an Aufgusser, an employee of the Leuze, who basically sizzles the participants into a frenzied sweat. Every twenty minutes, in rotating saunas, people cram in. Nobody wants to miss the event and you have to get there a few minutes early if you want a good seat – or a seat at all, if it’s a popular day for sauna-ing (Saturday night is pretty happening). Then the Aufgusser closes the door. And it begins. He or she will make a speech in German: “Hello, my name is Hans, and today I am going to put on a little rosemary-citron essential oil onto the rocks. The event will last five to eight minutes, and should be good for your lungs and throat. I hope you enjoy your Aufguss.” Then Hans (or Henrietta, or Hassan) opens the door and starts to wheel his towel around to circulate the air. After this he takes a large metal bowl filled with water and his essential oil of choice. He then ladles several cups of the liquid onto the rocks. The steam starts to rise, the vapors get in deep, and you’re slowly turning into roast-man. People are not allowed to talk during the Aufguss – this is a serious event bordering on spiritual. It gets hotter and hotter, and it doesn’t stop. Hans then takes a wet towel and twirls it in the air, increasing the intensity of the heat and getting the vapors even deeper into us. He does another round of ladling. And just when you think you can’t take it anymore, he takes his towel and unfolds it, and basically whips air at the Aufguss-goers. There is a traditional response to this towel-whipping: us sauna-goers raise our hands above our heads. I kind of feel like I’m being crucified or beaten in these moments – sometimes the heat gets so intense that the skin actually hurts. A good Aufgusser, however, doesn’t let it get quite that hot – and at the end of the Aufguss, Hans or Henrietta announces that the Aufguss is over, and he hopes everyone is happy. He wishes us a nice afternoon. Then we all break into applause and do our best not to stumble when we leave. Lounging outside, looking at the polluted Neckar or the dead ferris wheel or the endless traffic, the aesthetics of Stuttgart don’t seem to really matter. A bit of man-made snow on the back, and a bit of awe for the Aufgusser, who does one Aufguss after another for hours on end, wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Maybe you speak to a friend or you read a book or simply look at the sky. Maybe you go for a swim in the natural mineral baths, or soak your feet in their healing waters. Thoughts evaporate, as do the toxicities. Lying naked in the rain, snow or sun, I prefer not to think at all as I wait for the next Aufguss.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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The New Germany

Jonathan Garfinkel — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:38 +0000

So I am living in Germany under somewhat unusual circumstances. That is, I’m living in a castle. The castle is called Schloss Solitude and was built in the 18th century by Duke Karl-Eugen. It was actually his summer home and party palace, as it was just up the road (some 30 miles) from his main palace in Ludwisburg. Apparently he’d throw extravagant parties here in the summer, bringing everybody to the palace from Ludwisburg by horse-drawn carriage. Rumor has it the path was covered in salt – fake snow – to make it seem, well, Christmasy, I guess. In July. Oh, to be stupidly rich. Anyhow, they’ve converted the cavalry part of the palace into studios for artists. Every two years some 2000 artists from various disciplines are invited to apply for a long-term residency here. I was one of 70 accepted (as a writer) and given a studio and a flat for 8 months, plus a stipend of 1000 euro per month. Life is pretty, well, castle-y here. It’s 30 minutes from the city of Stuttgart, in the middle of a forest, on top of a hill. So it’s quiet. I sleep well. I write, read, and in the evenings I hang out with artists from all over the world: Brazil, Poland, Indonesia, Mexico, Austria. What else. There’s a fridge full of German beer. I walk in the forest, write poems on birch bark. No, I don’t do that. But the time to read, to write, to talk to other artists is invaluable. There is an important exchange here that goes on – many collaborations (of various kinds) begin in these castle walls. And the amazing thing is this international residency is paid for by the Baden-Wurtenberg government. I don’t know too many other countries where the state gives 1.5 million euro a year to an institution to bring artists under-35 from all over the world to make art. Sometimes there are openings of fellows’ work. There are readings, film screenings, and art festivals where people from Stuttgart come to visit. I’ve started a soccer league, and San Francisco-based artist Joshua Greene and I started up a Jewish Jogging Club together (current membership consisting of two). We throw parties, too, of course. There is something of the camp feel to this place – I mean summer camp. Some of my best experiences have been meeting German writers of my generation. The talks about history are what impress me the most. There is an awareness of history and politics that I find fascinating – a curiosity and compulsion lacking in many circles I’ve traveled in before. Given what’s gone on here the past century, the Germans of my generation have inherited a bizarre and difficult outlook on the world. My writer-friend Benjamin’s father survived Dachau, and his grandfather (on his mother’s side) was an SS-commander of a village in Ukraine. It’s no wonder he’s a writer. Often talk turns to politics between Benjamin and I. The other day we were talking American elections. He can’t understand the big deal made about the potential next American president’s personality. “Here, in Germany, we don’t want exciting characters. We want someone who can run the country well. And who cares if Obama is an exciting speaker? We all remember what happened the last time when we had a leader who could speak passionately.” Of course, Germans have a huge obsession with Obama, as we saw in the crowds for the Berlin speech this past summer. In fact, it is often lamented that the rest of the world gets a raw deal in these matters – America affects everyone and everything so much, yet we don’t get to vote. We’re relying on Joe-the-not-plumber to decide the fate of the world. And so on and so forth. Germany in the 21st century really is an incredible confluence of forces – artistic, political, intellectual. Perhaps it is its complicated history that has made it so artistically open here. People talk about a renaissance, especially in Berlin (and especially within Germany’s wildly innovative theatre scene). Renaissance or not, I have found myself surprised to say this: I like this country and I like being a writer here. I’ve said this openly to other Jewish artists I’ve met during my time in Germany and they echo this sentiment – there’s a growing number of American Jews and Israelis moving to Berlin. It’s a good place to be an artist right now. And we Jews who are returning, temporarily or permanently, can quickly brush up on our German, made easy, of course, by the Yiddish we were taught by our grandparents.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Alien Love

Jonathan Garfinkel — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:16:25 +0000

In the end, the play did have its premiere last night – and it went well, I think. At least the audience seemed to think so. The lead actress was on a ton of painkillers and could barely stand up, but she made it through rather bravely. The interesting thing was the humour didn’t seem to fly – Nazi jokes especially (Ooh. You could hear the walls breathe). I was told by the company dramaturge that German audiences don’t laugh very much and this evening was no exception. But I also think that people found the absurdist comedy aspects of the play to be taboo – Israel and Palestine are not something that is discussed in Germany in a critical way, and certainly not with screw-all humour. Theatre aside, I was reading BBC online this morning. Apparently the UK Ministry of Defence has recently released secret files pertaining to UFO sightings in the late 70s and 80s. According to one report, an Alitalia flight narrowly collided into a strange, brownish metallic object while ascending the British skies in 1991. It was deemed to be neither missile nor enemy aircraft; the authorities classified the strange sighting as a UFO. And so those bound for Rome nearly collided into inhabitants of Sirius, inches away from making the first interplanetary accident this side of Mars. This article is the top hit on the BBC website today. I admit it, as soon as I saw the headline – “Airliner had near Miss with UFO” – I went right to it. American elections, World Series results, business updates, forget about it – UFOs are a number one priority. Let’s face it. UFOs are interesting, not because of their unoriginal design (they seem so clunkily human, so right out of a 1970s sci-fi movie – see the drawings on the BBC website), but because of what might be inside them. Granted, I’ve never seen a UFO. Once I was lying on top of Mount Royal on mushrooms and I thought I saw one. But those were just very quick moving clouds. Maybe instead of talking about whether or not we’ve seen UFOs, we need to start asking the bigger questions: like what we’ll do if we ever meet the pilots of those mysterious ships. So when the aliens do come, how will we greet them? More importantly, what will we feed them? Do we go Mediterranean or Chinese? Continental or Sushi? I think there should be an International Aliens Greeting Committee, one that considers these and other important matters for when they arrive: what to wear, how to say “hello”, what sort of entertainment we’ll offer the aliens, where to show them around. And accommodation is really important. I think the aliens should be given an A-1 hotel with a spectacular view of things. Really zing them out, show them a good time on our planet. Of course, the UK, Chinese, Russian and US military likely have other plans for when and if the aliens do arrive. It’s unfortunate that some of us assume we’ll be under attack if a grand foreign envoy were to ever land on our planet. Maybe it’s a product of my willful ignorance but I assume the best in the universe. Somehow I can’t help but think that anyone who’d travel all this distance wouldn’t be doing it to blast the shit out of little us. Especially since we’re doing a fairly good job of that by ourselves.

The more I think about it, the more I think we need to believe in UFOs, in the possibility of life from elsewhere wanting to make contact. I don’t know whether we’re alone in the universe or not, but perhaps all of these UFO sightings aren’t about that anyways. Maybe these reports are more a product of a collective willful longing. It’s human beings crying out for something other, something different than this mess of a planet. We need something from out there to contact us, to reassure us, not only that we’re not alone, but that everything will somehow be all right.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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A Jewish Playwright in Germany

Jonathan Garfinkel — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:26:45 +0000

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, will be blogging all week as one of Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch bloggers. Garfinkel is currently living and directing a play in Germany.

I’m in Bochum, Germany, which I’m convinced is the armpit of Europe. Bochum is a former coal-mining town, completely destroyed in the war, and rebuilt in the 50s and 60s in lovely shades of grey and greyer (the occasional shit-brown stucco thrown in too, of course). This is the ‘ruhrpott’ of Germany – the industrial area of Dusseldorf, Essen, Dortmund – in the north and west. Last night coming home from the theatre after a few too many glasses of wine, my friend Benjamin and I saw a poster of Bochum that showed things from above – the city was suspiciously green. I think I’ve seen three trees since I arrived here. There are two great things about Bochum aside from the dreary architecture (I have a thing for dreary architecture – I mean it’s so ugly it’s beautiful – and Bochum does make Cleveland or Sault Ste. Marie look elegant). One is the Hotel Tucholsky, where I’m staying. It’s a lovely little hotel on top of a tapas bar. And they serve breakfast until 6 p.m. daily. Such a civilized place. The second thing I like about Bochum is the bar at the Schauspielhaus (theatre), where last night I found myself dancing until four. It was 1930s "jazz-swingers’ night", so there was lots of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and old German crooners from Weimar days and people decked out in their vintage best. Dim red lighting and no shortage of good, German beer. Incidentally, the theatre (Bochum Schauspielhaus) has been around since 1908, back in the days when coal-miners apparently used to watch plays on their lunch breaks.

I’m in Bochum because tonight is the world premiere of my play, House of Many Tongues. Or at least supposed to be. See, the lead actress has become deathly ill this past week due to some sort of huge infection in her throat that has prevented her from talking and eating (today it’s been reported that she finally ate some soup). So now I’m sitting anxiously drinking coffee contemplating wine waiting for the director to call and tell me whether or not the play is actually on.

Ah, theatre. It’s full of surprises.

Of course there is something surprising about a play about the Israel/Palestine conflict premiering in Germany, in German. What can I say. The journey has been anything but straightforward. House of Many Tongues is a play I’ve been working on for the past four years (in between other projects, of course). It began in 2004 when I went to Jerusalem in search of a house I’d heard that was shared between a Palestinian and an Israeli. The journey to find this house and the attempt to write the play became the core of my memoir Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine . Part of the story behind the memoir is about the impossibility of writing a play about Israel. I mean, it was the height of the second Intifada and the real world drama was much more dramatic than any kind of drama I put on the page.

In the end, I did find a way into writing the play. How did I do that? I wanted everyone to have a voice – that is, I let the Israelis and Palestinians speak (shout, gesticulate, scream), but I also wanted the surroundings to speak too. I gave voice to the inanimate and made the house the central character. I suppose the idea was that I wanted to hear the heart of things. Surely a house has an opinion on this century old conflict. Surely her stake in the matter should be considered too. Anyhow, let’s just hope it actually hits the damn stage.

In the meantime I’ll spend my day waiting and considering what the hell else I should do with my life other than write. A friend of mine once said I’d make a good midwife. Hmm. This afternoon I think I’ll opt for the Rioja instead.

Jonathan Garfinkel, author of Ambivalence: Adventures in Israel and Palestine, is guest-blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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