In the spring of 1980 as a first-year college student, I was offered an opportunity that was also a dilemma. My friend Steve and many of our mutual friends had signed up for a semester aboard program for the following Fall in Munich. There was still room in the program. Did I want to go?
On the one hand it made perfect sense. What an incredible opportunity to spend a semester in Europe for the same cost as a semester in Greensboro, N.C. I could room with Steve and the trip would be led by a physics professor I didn’t know well but generally liked. I had even studied German in High School though my grasp of the language was pretty flimsy. But as a Jew born just 16 years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust and whose own grandparents and great grandparents had left Germany, my feelings about Germany and Germans were, well, complicated. I decided to go but not without some trepidation.
At the time, I played the Scottish Highland Bagpipes, which I had taken up in High School. I brought my pipes with me to Germany and out of consideration for the neighbors, I only practiced outdoors in public parks. One day toward evening, I was practicing near our apartment and a man (assuming I was British) began cursing at me. A number of other people leapt to my defense and a lovely older Frau, learning I was an American college student, invited me to her home for a meal. I ended up going back for dinner every week thereafter and got to know her family including her grown children and 4-year-old granddaughter, Sabina, very well. But one night, Frau asked me a question that was so unexpected and threw me for such a loop that for a moment I didn’t know how I wanted to answer it.
I had reason to recall that question this week when I learned that a 2019 change in German law allows me, as a descendent of German Jews, to apply for German citizenship. There are many good reasons to do this (reclaiming something that was wrongfully taken from my grandparents, EU citizenship, easier travel to and throughout Europe). But changing or even just amending ones Nationality (even if you believe as I do that Nationality is a particularly bankrupt human construct) is still a decision that probes one’s sense of identity surprisingly deeply.
I haven’t yet decided about applying for German citizenship but contemplating it brings back the question that the Frau, whose last name I have now forgotten, asked me more than 40 years ago.
I wrote a poem about that question. By omitting punctuation and running together all the thoughts and sentences, I tried to create a kind of stream of consciousness, breathless quality and capture that sense of having just a moment to respond to an extremely fraught and complicated question asked of a 19-year-old by seemingly kind people who were old enough to have participated in the Holocaust.
My answer to her question was a defining moment for my identity and is the title of the poem.
Ich bin ein Jude
Thirty-five years ago the Führer blew out his brains in a bunker under the capital of the Reich and I’m 18 studying in Bavaria land of my grandfather’s birth and this family has been hosting me for supper every week since they found me playing Highland Bagpipes in the park hospitality redemption Marshall Plan gratitude for America and we are watching the news after dinner most of it going over my head because in spite of years of high school and college German and three months here the language still sounds to me like a hammer on plumbing Hitler’s machine gun sputter from Triumph of the Will and there is a man being interviewed on television and Frau says a Jew outlining a semicircle over her nose with her index finger and what religion are you and I pretend not to understand with my lousy German You know Catholic Lutheran exhausting 90 percent of the possibilities with those two options but I don’t have a religion atheist born raised devout and I look at their generations Frau and Herr adult children and their 4-year-old granddaughter and it takes a moment the words to find