Anetta Kahane's Lehrjahre , Or, the Discovery of My Judaism

Anetta Kahane. Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten. Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, 2004. 351 S. EUR 19.90, cloth, ISBN 978-3-87134-470-1. Reviewed by Anthony Kauders Published on H-German (September, 2005) The photograph on the dust jacket is a mes‐ spent time in India and Brazil, still young enough sage. It reads: I am self-confident (the friendly, yet to be able to join her parents abroad. By contrast, assertive smile), and I am Jewish (the necklace her brothers, who had already reached a certain with a Star of David). The photograph on the cov‐ age (fifth grade), were forced to remain in the er and the lines in the book converge as we par‐ country and to attend a boarding school. As an take of Kahane's life. It is an extraordinary life, adolescent, Kahane began to notice how her par‐ told well, in an accessible language, with frighten‐ ents' memories differed from those of many other ing details and occasional sentimentalities. Avid families. In a striking passage outlining the way in Ostalgiker will be disappointed, as will be all which her classmates reflected on the war, she those who prefer Hegel to Goethe. There is no dia‐ writes: "Illegality, emigration, fought, persecuted, lectic in these memoirs, only the teleology of perished. For the other children: Fatherland, someone who has found her place in life. Heimat, aerial bombardments, incarceration, fall‐ Anetta Kahane's story is one that, in its inten‐ en" (p. 37). Here we detect the book's implicit tele‐ sity and complexity, could not be related by most ology--recollections that prefigure later events are of us. Born in East Berlin in 1954, Kahane is the presented in great detail, suggesting the current daughter of parents for whom socialism displaced need to legitimate a particular narrative. possible ties to Judaism, for whom the anti-fascist This pattern also holds in the author's report promise of the newborn state engendered loyal‐ on her time at Rostock University, where she stud‐ ties that made criticism of that state all but impos‐ ied Latin American history and literature, or in sible. A Republican fghter in the Spanish Civil Sao Tome and Mozambique, where she worked as War, her father worked for various newspapers, an interpreter. In each case, Kahane portrays her‐ including Neues Deutschland. Her mother, who is self as unique in her appreciation of East German depicted in somewhat harsher terms, belonged to racism. To be sure, the bigotry she retells is terri‐ the famous Klemperer family. As a child, Kahane ble enough. At Rostock, for example, local aca‐ H-Net Reviews demics often treated the "oversexed" and "hot- murdered man (p. 314). It is this over-identifica‐ blooded" Chileans with contempt; in Mozambique tion that also permits her to write the following GDR technicians had few doubts as to the inferior‐ words (left in the original) on the Holocaust, lead‐ ity of the local population. Kahane adds, however, ing us to believe that the Jews, of all people, need that she remained close to the isolated Latin not wrestle with the problem of theodicy: "Es [the American contingent and prodded Mozam‐ Shema Israel prayer] war das Erste und das Let‐ biquean officials to resist East German arrogance. zte, was die Juden in den Gaskammern gesungen Her emphases, in other words, are meant to high‐ haben. Es ist wie eine Beschwörung aller Men‐ light an awareness of racialism and racism in the schen, dass Gott der Versöhnende und gleichzeitig GDR that was rare, rare at least until many years der Zornige, Antreibende sei. Trotz allem, was later, in post-unification times, when the former den Juden angetan wird. Trotz der Vernichtung, policeman Bernd Wagner became the frst person der Demütigung und des Hasses" (p. 263). It is of to respond to her challenge "I see something that course not certain whether such a statement de‐ you don't see" in an adequate manner (p. 242). rives from her upbringing in the GDR, but it does And indeed, the last third of Kahane's biography show that Kahane is very much concerned with is in many ways the most impressive, as she de‐ overcoming the legacy of East German Jewry, with tails her struggles in organizations combatting the its emphasis on class as opposed to faith. And if at right-wing menace. These include the Amadeu times the reader is left a bit bewildered, it is be‐ Antonio Stiftung, Arbeitskreis Sinti und Roma, cause some of Kahane's confessions sound awk‐ and the Zentrum für Demokratische Kultur. We ward in their declamatory, even apologetic style. are introduced to the world of East German na‐ Still, this bewilderment should not detract from tionalbefreite Zonen, where skinheads rule the the story of her life, which everyone interested in streets, burghers hunt down Africans, and police‐ GDR-Jewish history ought to read. men refuse to assist democratic forces. We are also offered insights into the use of language in the GDR, where "solidarity" became a hollow term in an effort to appear international; and in the East German states after 1990, where people came to employ the hitherto unknown word "stigmati‐ zation" whenever they sought to ward off charges from the West. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Ka‐ hane's autobiography concerns her Jewish identi‐ ty. Inasmuch as her Lehrjahre trace the evolution of a Jewish consciousness, they testify to an iden‐ tification that sometimes borders on kitsch. When her father sings a Chassidic song, for example, it is enough to "unleash the whole canon of feelings" (p. 54). When she recovers a siddur (prayer book) from the foor of an abandoned synagogue in Ma‐ puto, it feels "heavy as lead" in her hand (p. 113). A Jewish prayer repeatedly conjures up desert sand (p. 261), while only the prayer for the dead on Yom Kippur allows her fnally to weep for a 2 H-Net Reviews If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-german Citation: Anthony Kauders. Review of Kahane, Anetta. Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2005. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11146 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.

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