ONE
 
A Boy Named Jew
 
 
I was born in 1982 as the citizen of a democratic, forward-looking, peaceful Germany. I’ve lived all over the country, growing up in reasonably idyllic places like Munich, Freiburg, Kassel, Maulbronn, Laupheim, and Karlsruhe, until I left to go to college in England at age eighteen. German is, and will forever remain, the only language I speak without an accent.
My family’s Jewish identity, meanwhile, has never been strong. While the fact that they are Jews shaped the lives of my grandparents, and even those of my parents, in deeply tragic ways, they are neither religious nor traditional. As for me, I never celebrated my bar mitzvah, and feel far more comfortable on a soccer field or at the library than in a synagogue.
Even so, as I grew up, I came to feel more and more Jewish—and less and less German.
In July 1990, when I had just turned eight, Germany faced Argentina in the final of the World Cup. After eighty-four long minutes, Roberto Sensini brought down Rudi Völler, the referee awarded a penalty kick, and Andreas Brehme scored the only goal of the match. Germany took the world championship and I was ecstatic, waving a little German flag, and chanting “Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland” at the television.
But by 2010, when Germany faced Spain in the semifinals of the same tournament, I felt more ambivalent. Yes, Germany’s team was younger, more skilled, even more diverse than ever before. Yet when the chips were down, I found myself rooting for the Spanish team. And the real reason why I was glad, or perhaps relieved, when, in the seventy-third minute of play, Carles Puyol headed the ball into the net for Spain’s winning goal, wasn’t even that I liked the Spanish team. The real reason—I feel embarrassed to admit this, but it is true—was that I simply couldn’t bring myself to support the German team.
At some point in those two decades—somewhere between 1990 and 2010, between the ages of eight and twenty-eight—I had stopped rooting for the German team, or identifying with Germany, or thinking of myself as German.
Until today, I’m not quite sure why this happened.
*   *   *
When I was fourteen, Klaus, a regular at my chess club, tried to turn me into a Nazi. Klaus wasn’t threatening and he wasn’t a skinhead—he was a middle-aged, middle-class, mid-level manager at BMW. Actually, we were friends, of sorts.
One evening, over a game of speed chess—or Blitz, as it’s called in German—Klaus told me that, some ten years earlier, on a trip to Paris, two black men had mugged him. The experience, he said, had opened his eyes to the moral superiority of the Aryan race. He now realized that politically correct opinions were a bunch of lies. Germans should be proud of their race and country. It was high time for the German nation to assert itself again. So Klaus explained, calmly, taking another sip of his Weissbier.
“You won’t convince me, of all people,” I said.
“Sure I will,” he responded. “Everyone resists at first. It’s not what we’re supposed to think. Goes against all the indoctrination. But it’s obvious Germans are superior to others. If you think about it with an open mind, you’ll agree.”
“You don’t understand,” I said cautiously. “I’m not exactly … well, I’m not … Aryan, you see.”
“You aren’t?” Klaus smiled a good-natured smile at me. “You mean because you’re short and have dark hair? Don’t be silly. Not every Aryan is tall and blond. Just look at Hitler! No, no, you’re Aryan all right.”
There was, I realized, only one way out of this conversation. But I was nervous about it—just as I was nervous anytime I had to tell somebody this simple fact about myself.
“I’m Jewish.”
Klaus might have expected for me to be any number of things: a Trotskyite, an anarchist, perhaps even a Jehovah’s Witness. The one thing that had never occurred to him—that much was obvious from his frozen face—was that I might be a Jew. He did not know what to say, perhaps because there were too many phrases that could have expressed his disbelief—the kind of phrases I typically heard when I mentioned that I was Jewish. “But … you speak such good German.” Or: “But … you don’t look Jewish.”
Klaus remained sheepish, almost stricken, for ten, twenty, thirty seconds. When he finally began to stutter a reply, I got up and walked away.
*   *   *
My encounter with Klaus shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In today’s Germany, there is a dark underbelly of lingering, even resurgent, anti-Semitism. Neo-Nazi organizations like the National Democratic Party (NPD) have at times been able to celebrate considerable electoral successes. And most neo-Nazis aren’t as civil as Klaus. In 2011, 811 anti-Semitic crimes, ranging from defaced tombs in Jewish cemeteries to a few violent assaults, were registered in Germany. (Only five arrests were made.)
As former government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye admitted, there are some places those who are visibly non-Aryan do well to avoid. In some areas of contemporary Germany, sporting a yarmulke, or being black, makes trouble likely.
Sociologists suggest that anti-Semitic attitudes are even widespread among seemingly ordinary, law-abiding people—and have been on the rise in recent years. According to a 2012 study, over 40 percent of Germans partly or strongly agree with the notion that Jews “always sow disharmony with their ideas,” or that they have “too much influence” in Germany. Even more give credence to the notion that Jews have too much power on Wall Street. A study commissioned by the German government concluded that, all things considered, about a fifth of Germans can be considered “latently anti-Semitic.”
Hatred of immigrants is even more widespread than anti-Semitism. Thirty-seven percent of Germans either fully or strongly support the notion that Germany is überfremdet, or “over-foreignized”; another 27 percent partially agree and partially disagree with this idea. Worse still, a staggering 58 percent believe that “freedom of religion should be significantly curtailed” for some religious groups, especially Muslims.
Despite all of these glaring facts, German politicians and journalists have long played down the threat posed by Germany’s far right. Between September 2000 and April 2006, nine small-business owners with foreign roots—eight Turkish and one Greek—were murdered in cold blood. Police and the media quickly jumped to a convenient conclusion: it must, they suggested, have been a matter of score-settling among Turkish gangs.
When it turned out that the assassinations had been carried out by a terrorist organization calling itself the National Socialist Underground—an organization whose members had long enjoyed considerable support from German secret service organizations hoping to cultivate them as informers—journalists colored themselves shocked at the...