Kauders on Kahane, 'Ich Sehe Was, Was Du Nicht Siehst: Meine Deutschen Geschichten'
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H-German Kauders on Kahane, 'Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten' Review published on Thursday, September 1, 2005 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 (Department of History Keele University) Published on H-German (September, 2005) Anetta Kahane's Lehrjahre, or, the Discovery of My Judaism The photograph on the dust jacket is a message. It reads: I am self-confident (the friendly, yet assertive smile), and I am Jewish (the necklace with a Star of David). The photograph on the cover and the lines in the book converge as we partake of Kahane's life. It is an extraordinary life, told well, in an accessible language, with frightening details and occasional sentimentalities. AvidOstalgiker will be disappointed, as will be all those who prefer Hegel to Goethe. There is no dialectic in these memoirs, only the teleology of someone who has found her place in life. Anetta Kahane's story is one that, in its intensity and complexity, could not be related by most of us. Born in East Berlin in 1954, Kahane is the daughter of parents for whom socialism displaced possible ties to Judaism, for whom the anti-fascist promise of the newborn state engendered loyalties that made criticism of that state all but impossible. A Republican fighter in the Spanish Civil War, her father worked for various newspapers, including Neues Deutschland. Her mother, who is depicted in somewhat harsher terms, belonged to the famous Klemperer family. As a child, Kahane spent time in India and Brazil, still young enough to be able to join her parents abroad. By contrast, her brothers, who had already reached a certain age (fifth grade), were forced to remain in the country and to attend a boarding school. As an adolescent, Kahane began to notice how her parents' memories differed from those of many other families. In a striking passage outlining the way in which her classmates reflected on the war, she writes: "Illegality, emigration, fought, persecuted, perished. For the other children: Fatherland, Heimat, aerial bombardments, incarceration, fallen" (p. 37). Here we detect the book's implicit teleology--recollections that prefigure later events are presented in great detail, suggesting the current need to legitimate a particular narrative. This pattern also holds in the author's report on her time at Rostock University, where she studied Latin American history and literature, or in Sao Tome and Mozambique, where she worked as an interpreter. In each case, Kahane portrays herself as unique in her appreciation of East German racism. To be sure, the bigotry she retells is terrible enough. At Rostock, for example, local academics often treated the "oversexed" and "hot-blooded" Chileans with contempt; in Mozambique GDR technicians had few doubts as to the inferiority of the local population. Kahane adds, however, that she remained close to the isolated Latin American contingent and prodded Mozambiquean officials to resist East German arrogance. Her emphases, in other words, are meant to highlight an awareness of racialism and racism in the GDR that was rare, rare at least until many years later, in post-unification times, when the former policeman Bernd Wagner became the first person to respond Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kauders on Kahane, 'Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44352/kauders-kahane-ich-sehe-was-was-du-nicht-siehst-meine-deutschen Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German to her challenge "I see something that you don't see" in an adequate manner (p. 242). And indeed, the last third of Kahane's biography is in many ways the most impressive, as she details her struggles in organizations combatting the right-wing menace. These include the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, Arbeitskreis Sinti und Roma, and the Zentrum für Demokratische Kultur. We are introduced to the world of East German nationalbefreite Zonen, where skinheads rule the streets, burghers hunt down Africans, and policemen 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 "stigmatization" whenever they sought to ward off charges from the West. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Kahane's autobiography concerns her Jewish identity. Inasmuch as her Lehrjahre trace the evolution of a Jewish consciousness, they testify to an identification 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 asiddur (prayer book) from the floor of an abandoned synagogue in Maputo, 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 finally to weep for a murdered man (p. 314). It is this over-identification that also permits her to write the following words (left in the original) on the Holocaust, leading us to believe that the Jews, of all people, need not wrestle with the problem of theodicy: "Es [the Shema Israel prayer] war das Erste und das Letzte, was die Juden in den Gaskammern gesungen haben. Es ist wie eine Beschwörung aller Menschen, dass Gott der Versöhnende und gleichzeitig der Zornige, Antreibende sei. Trotz allem, was den Juden angetan wird. Trotz der Vernichtung, der Demütigung und des Hasses" (p. 263). It is of course not certain whether such a statement derives from her upbringing in the GDR, but it does show that Kahane is very much concerned with overcoming the legacy of East German Jewry, with its emphasis on class as opposed to faith. And if at times the reader is left a bit bewildered, it is because some of Kahane's confessions sound awkward in their declamatory, even apologetic style. Still, this bewilderment should not detract from the story of her life, which everyone interested in GDR-Jewish history ought to read. Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=11146 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: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11146 Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected]. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kauders on Kahane, 'Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44352/kauders-kahane-ich-sehe-was-was-du-nicht-siehst-meine-deutschen Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2.