Croatia Is Brazenly Attempting To Rewrite - Tablet Magazine

22/2/2019 Croatia Is Brazenly Attempting to Rewrite its Holocaust Crimes Out of History – Tablet Magazine
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CROATIA IS BRAZENLY ATTEMPTING TO REWRITE ITS

HOLOCAUST CRIMES OUT OF HISTORY
An alarming and expanding wave of revisionism in Eastern Europe
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft
October 9, 2017 • 12:00 AM
The leadership of the small Jewish community in Croatia, along with representatives of the country’s
Serb minority, has boycotted the last two government-sponsored Holocaust commemorations in
2016 and 2017. Demonstrating impressive moral courage and integrity, they refuse to condone a
historical revisionism with echoes of Holocaust denial that aims to rehabilitate the Ustasha, a
Croatian fascist movement led by the nationalist dictator Ante Pavelić that aggressively and ardently
murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
The present stand-off between the Croatian Jewish community and the Croatian government
(celebrating Croatian independence yesterday) over the manner in which the Holocaust is
commemorated—or not commemorated—and the effective rehabilitation and glorification of the
Ustasha came to a head after a March 2016 Israel-Croatia soccer match, where Croatian spectators
shouted the notorious Ustasha slogan “Za dom spremni,” or “Ready for the Homeland,” in the
presence of the Croatian prime minister, who apparently sat by without reacting.
Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic subsequently issued a statement in which he said “the Croatian
government, and I personally, condemn the crimes of the Ustasha regime.” However, “revitalization
of the Ustasha regime is only exceptionally condemned,” Dr. Ognjen Kraus, president of the
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/246116/croatia-rewrite-holocaust-crimes-out-of-history 1/14
Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Communities of Croatia, said at that time. “It is an avalanche
that reminds us of what was happening in the so-called independent state of Croatia.”
It is true that Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic had similarly condemned the Ustasha’s
role during the Holocaust during a 2015 visit to Israel. “I express my deepest regrets to all the victims
of the Holocaust in Croatia, killed at the hands of the collaborationist Ustasha regime during World
War II,” she said at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. On a subsequent trip to Canada, however, President
Grabar-Kitarovic sent a far different message when she posed with a group of Croatian émigrés
holding a flag bearing the Ustasha symbol. She also raised eyebrows when she said in a radio
interview that “I adore listening to” a popular Croatian singer-songwriter who regularly glorifies the
Ustasha.
Even President Grabar-Kitarovic’s reference to the Ustasha as a collaborationist regime falls far short
of the mark. The Ustasha initiated the brutality and mass killing of Serbs, Jews and Roma on their
own initiative, for their own perverse ideological reasons. As Saul Friedländer wrote in his Nazi
Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, The Years of Extermination:
In Croatia, no sooner did Pavelić return from Italian exile and establish
his new regime—a mixture of fascism and devout Catholicism—then, as
the German envoy to Zagreb, Edmund von Glaise Horstenau, reported
“the Ustasha went raging mad.” The poglavnik (“leader,” in Serbo-
Croat) launched a genocidal crusade against the 2.2 million Christian
Orthodox Serbs (out of a total population of 6.7 million) living on
Croatian territory, and against the country’s 45,000 Jews, particularly
in ethnically mixed Bosnia. The Catholic Ustasha did not mind the
continuous presence of Muslims or Protestants,
Protesta but Serbs and Jews had
to convert, leave or to die. According to historian Jonathan Steinberg,
“Serbian and Jewish men, women and children were literally hacked to
death. Whole villages were razed to the ground and the people driven to
barns, to which the Ustasha set fire. There is in the Italian Foreign
Ministry archive a collection of photographs of the butcher knives,
hooks, and axes used to chop up Serbian victims. There are
photographs of Serb women with breasts hacked off by pocket knives,
men with eyes gouged out, emasculated, and mutilated.”
Other factors contributed to the Jewish community’s decision not to participate in the April 2016
commemoration at Jasenovac. Earlier that month, extreme-nationalist Croatian Minister of Culture
Zlatko Hasanbegović attended the widely-publicized Croatian premiere of a documentary film titled
Jasenovac—The Truth, by the Croatian filmmaker Jakov Sedlar. This film contended that Jasenovac
had not been a concentration camp where the Ustasha had committed genocide, but rather a far
more benign labor camp and that the number of victims of Jasenovac had been greatly exaggerated.
Hasanbegović publicly praised the film, saying, “This is the best way to finally shed light on a number
of controversial places in Croatian history.”
In sharp contrast, the Israeli ambassador to Zagreb, Zina Kalay Kleitman, who had also attended the
premiere, denounced the film in no uncertain terms. “Since I am Israeli, and a descendant of a family
that was hit by Holocaust, I wanted to see and look at the film, which, in my opinion, very selectively
shows history, attempts to revise historical facts, and offends the feelings of people who have lost
their loved ones in Jasenovac,” she wrote in an open letter, adding that, “I also noticed an attempt to
downplay the terrible extent of the crimes committed, or at least an attempt to illustrate them with
historical events that led to them.”
In late 2016, far-right political figures and veterans of the 1990-era Croatian Defense Forces put up a
plaque in the Croatian municipality of Jasenovac that featured the “Za dom spremni” slogan. The
ostensible reason for putting up the plaque was to commemorate 11 fighters of the Croatian military
who died during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Croatian journalist Vojislav Macoko placed the
controversy squarely in historical and moral perspective. Setting the plaque in the town of Jasenovac
was “unacceptable” for a number of reasons, he said. “The first is that it is unacceptable to erect a
monument with such a greeting because it’s the Ustasha salute. This is public glorification of
domestic Nazism. The other reason is because it is, of course, Jasenovac.”
At the time, the Croatian government’s failure to take any action to remove the plaque, along with its
general casting of the Ustasha as no worse (if not better) than the Communist-led anti-fascist
partisans of WWII, caused the Jewish community to boycott the official state commemoration of
International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, 2017. “If the red star [the insignia of the
Partisans] and the Ustasha’s ‘U’ [insignia] are the same, then there’s nothing more to talk about,”
explained Dr. Kraus.
In early September of this year, the Associate Press reported that the plaque had at last been taken
down in Jasenovac and that Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had said that the salute was
unacceptable to him because of its association with the WWII Ustasha regime. However, according
to a spokesperson of a Croatian veterans group, the plaque was merely being moved to another
location. “It will be placed elsewhere as it is,” Ivan Friscic declared. “With all the symbols and signs,
and no one must touch it.”
***
The overall history of the Holocaust in most of Nazi-occupied Europe is well known, thanks to a
great extent to the works of historians such as Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer, and
David Cesarani, and to major institutions dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and research,
including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,
and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. The same, however, cannot be said for the
perpetration of the Holocaust in the Balkans.
The Balkan genocide during WWII has been more difficult to chronicle than the methodical
annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of Nazi Germany elsewhere. In large part, this is due to
the fact that, as David Cesarani noted in his monumental Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-
1949, after Yugoslavia was dismembered in April 1941 following the invasion of that country by Axis
forces, “around 40,000 Jews ended up in the German client-state of Croatia; 15,000 in Serbia, which
was little more than an autonomous region under direct German rule; about 16,000 in Backa, a block
of land annexed to Hungary; 8,000 in western Macedonia, occupied by Bulgaria; and several
thousand in the coastal strip of Macedonia under Italian jurisdiction.”
It must be noted that the Independent State of Croatia that was carved out of Yugoslavia in 1941 was
geographically different from the present-day Republic of Croatia in that it included Bosnia and
Herzegovina as well as parts of Serbia and Slovenia, but not Dalmatia, which had been given to Italy.
Only 24,000 Jews lived in what is today the Republic of Croatia.
Any study of the Holocaust in the Balkans requires separate analysis of each of the regions of what
had been—and would resume to be after the war—Yugoslavia. In Serbia, for instance, German
soldiers massacred 4,000 to 5,000 Jewish men in the autumn of 1941, and thousands more Jewish
men, women, and children, as well as Roma, were subsequently murdered at the Nazi concentration
camp of Sajmište (Semlin in German). In Macedonia, Jews were in due course handed over by the
Bulgarian government to the Germans for deportation, resulting in the near decimation of that
community. In Croatia, the gruesome course of events was different yet again.
Also, while the Holocaust in most parts of Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe was carried out
predominantly by Nazi Germany, albeit with the assistance and often eager participation of nationals
of the respective countries in question, Croatia is in a separate category, together with Ion
Antonescu’s fascist regime in Romania. The genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, headed by
the Ustasha leader and ideologue Ante Pavelić, was carried out not by Germans but by Croatians
without direction or even the participation by the SS or other German genocidaires. When it comes
to Croatia, incidentally, the plural “genocides”—rather than singular “genocide”—is appropriate
because the Ustasha targeted primarily Serbs for annihilation, alongside Jews and Roma. According
to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Croat authorities murdered between 320,000 and
340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustasha rule; more than
30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
The Ustasha established a network of home-grown concentration camps infamous for their brutality
and comparable to the barbarity of the German death and concentration camps. The most notorious
of these was a group of five camps collectively named Jasenovac, near Zagreb, often referred to as the
“Auschwitz of the Balkans.” Again according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, somewhere
between 77,000 and 99,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma were brutally murdered there. The Jasenovac
Memorial Site has identified by name 83,145 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascists who perished in
these camps.
“The Jasenovac camps were an execution site and grave for more than half the Jewish victims during
the existence of the [independent state of Croatia] and for more than one-third of the Zagreb Jews
who disappeared in the Holocaust in 1941-1945,” wrote historians Ivo Goldstein and Slavko
Goldstein in their The Holocaust in Croatia. Yet for most of the post-WWII era, little public
discussion or awareness was devoted to the Holocaust within the former Yugoslavia or elsewhere in
the Balkans.
Leaders of the Croatian Jewish community have expressed displeasure at the way the history of
Jasenovac is being presented in the permanent exhibition at the site of the camp. “Jasenovac is
shown there more as a collection and labor camp,” Judge Sanja Zoričić Tabaković, president of the
Executive Board of the Jewish Community of Zagreb and representative of the Jewish National
Minority in the City of Zagreb, told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. “According to what
[is displayed] and how it’s presented in the exhibition, it doesn’t look like an execution site. In the
exhibition, one can’t see photos of killed people, but only of those who saved themselves or were
exchanged [in prisoner exchanges] or survived.”
In effect, both the revisionist Sedlar film and the exhibit at Jasenovac affirmatively distorted and
denied the fundamental truth that the Ustasha committed atrocities there that today would
unquestionably be considered genocide as a matter of international law.
***
One of the earliest controversies in this regard came after Croatia declared its independence from
Yugoslavia in 1991, and it became known that its first president, the hardline nationalist Franjo
Tudjman, had maintained that the generally accepted number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust
was greatly exaggerated. Tudjman had also made numerous anti-Semitic slurs, including, notably:
“A Jew is still a Jew. Even in the camps, they retained their bad characteristics: selfishness, perfidy,
meanness, slyness, and treachery.” Tudjman eventually apologized—at least twice—first in 1992 in a
letter to World Jewish Congress President Edgar M. Bronfman, and again the following year to Kent
Schiner, the international president of B’nai B’rith.
Tudjman effectively began the process of casting the Ustasha as Croatian patriots rather than
criminals, maintaining that fascist and anti-fascist Croatians deserved equal recognition for their
service to their country. As The New York Times observed in 1997, “Perhaps no other country has
failed as openly as Croatia to come to terms with its fascist legacy. While the French celebrate a
resistance movement that was often dwarfed by the widespread collaboration with the Vichy regime,
and while the Austrians often act as if the war never happened, the Croats have rehabilitated the
Croatian fascist collaborators, known as the Ustasha.”
Despite having himself fought with Tito’s Communist partisans, Tudjman named former Ustasha
officials to government positions. He also restored the kuna as the Croatian currency, using the name
of the monetary unit that had been the national currency of Pavelić’s Ustasha government. “I, like
other Croatian Jews, am personally offended by this decision, as well as by the government’s
arguments, which are rubbish,” said Ivo Goldstein, a medieval historian at the University of Zagreb.
“This is an insult and an offense to Serbs, to Jews, and to the Croats who fought against the Ustasha
regime.”
The Croatian president’s whitewashing of the Ustasha outraged many Croatians who had suffered
under the fascist regime. “You cannot reconcile victims and butchers,” declared Ognjen Kraus, head
of the Zagreb Jewish community. “No one has the right to carry out a reconciliation in the name of
those who vanished.”
The Ustasha made no secret of their desire and intent to kill Jews and Serbs because of their
respective ethnic or national identities. British historian Rory Yeomans quotes Ustasha leader Victor
Gutić stating at a rally on May 29, 1941, that he had “published drastic laws” for the Serb
population’s “complete economic destruction, and new ones will follow for their complete
extermination.” Yeomans also quotes Croatian Foreign Minister Mladen Lorković declaring on July
27, 1941, that Ustasha Croatia’s mission was to “cleanse itself of all those elements that are the
misfortune of the nation, that drain healthy forces in our nation. These are our Serbs and Jews.”
Along the same lines, Professor Aleksandar Seitz, referred to by Yeomans as one of the Ustasha’s
“leading social theorists,” said in a June 1941 speech that “the Serbs and the Jews will not exist, and
nor will those who served them because our Croatian army and the Croatian Ustashas are
guaranteeing it.”
Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have chronicled in detail the subsequent brutal annihilation of Croatian
Jews by the Ustasha in numerous concentration and death camps, and especially at Jasenovac,
calling their text appropriately the “Apogee of Terror.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
describes Jasenovac as follows: “Conditions in the Jasenovac camps were horrendous. Prisoners
received minimal food. Shelter and sanitary facilities were totally inadequate. Worse still, the guards
cruelly tortured, terrorized, and murdered prisoners at will.”
Historians do not argue about conditions in Jasenovac—or about the purpose of the camp. Raul
Hilberg referred to the Jasenovac camps as “death camps,” and Saul Friedländer called Jasenovac an
“extermination camp.” Commenting on one of many incidents of Holocaust minimization and
outright denial that now appear to be woven together in a comprehensive denial of historical reality,
Judge Zoričić Tabaković said that: “I think that this is something so outrageous on an international
level. This level of denial of everything that happened in Croatia in WWII is unbelievable.”
***
A brief detour is necessary here to address the campaign in many formerly communist Eastern and
central European countries to place Nazism and Communism on the same moral plane, or even to
depict Stalinism and the various post-Stalinist strains of communism as worse—more evil, if you will
—than Nazism. Without in any way minimizing the oppression and suffering endured by large parts
of the populations under Communist regimes, it is beyond question that no post-WWII Communist
regime anywhere in Europe committed or attempted to commit genocide. To be sure, there were
large-scale political imprisonments, far-reaching deprivations of civil and human rights, and
politically motivated killings. However, as Yehuda Bauer stated eloquently in response to a 2009
resolution of the European Parliament determining Aug. 23, the anniversary of the signing of the
1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, as a date to commemorate the victims of both regimes, “to
compare this with the murder of many millions of Europeans by the Nazi regime, and especially with
the state-planned genocide of the Jews (Holocaust) in the context of Nazi crimes generally … is a
distortion of history.” The comparison is especially invidious, as Bauer made clear, because “a
certain number” of those persecuted by the Communists “had, in fact, been Nazi collaborators.”
This was certainly the case in Croatia, where the post-war Tito regime engaged in large-scale killing
of members of the Ustasha, but this was in revenge and retaliation for the crimes—and they were
crimes—committed by the Ustasha during their reign. Such politically motivated excesses, however
heinous, cannot be compared, let alone equated, with the genocides that the Ustasha had unleashed
on Serbs, Jews, and Roma. “One certainly should remember the victims of the Soviet regime,” Bauer
concluded, “and there is every justification for designating special memorials and events to do so.
But to put the two regimes on the same level and commemorating the different crimes on the same
occasion is totally unacceptable.”
Initiatives to glorify Nazi collaborators have been undertaken elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. In
Serbia, proceedings are underway, despite objections by the Serbian Jewish community, to clear the
name of Milan Nedic, the Quisling-like prime minister of Nazi-occupied Serbia who actively
collaborated in the persecution of Serbian Jews. “Rehabilitation would represent a devaluation of
indisputable historical facts, and an insult to all the victims and survivors of the survivors. Serbia
would also suffer moral and political damage,” Haris Dojc, a member of the Jewish Community of
Belgrade, explained in 2016. “Nedic and his government were directly involved in the seizure of
Jewish real estate, as well as in the identification and arrest of Jews in occupied Serbia, which
confirmed his role in the implementation of the Holocaust in Serbia.”
In the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, right-wing extremists hold an annual march in honor of an anti-
Semitic Bulgarian general who headed the pro-Nazi Union of Bulgarian National Legions. Also in
Bulgaria, the ultranationalist anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Roma, and anti-Turkish Ataka party,
which derived its name from Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi paper, Der Angriff (the attack), has won seats in
every parliamentary election since 2005. Ataka’s leader, Volen Siderov, was described in The New
York Times as “a former journalist turned xenophobic nationalist,” and has publicly referred
dismissively to “the so-called Holocaust.” In 2011, The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee denounced the
republication of Siderov’s “extreme anti-Semitic and inciting books, The Boomerang of Evil and The
Rule of Mammon” as “an abomination, which should not be overlooked.”
Yet another example of the glorification of anti-Semitic fascists of the Holocaust era, among others,
can be found in Slovakia, where the ultra-nationalist Kotleba—The People’s Party—Our Slovakia
(named for its leader, Marian Kotleba, who used to wear Nazi-like uniforms) won 14 out of 150 seats
in the 2016 parliamentary elections. British-Canadian journalist Tom Nicholson described Kotleba’s
followers to the BBC as “skinheads who sieg heil in public and have rallies in Bratislava—1,500 to
2,000 people—shouting hatred toward refugees and migrants from the Middle East.” Kotleba and
other far-right groups in Slovakia have been actively promoting the rehabilitation of Yozef Tiso, the
president of the Nazi collaborationist First Slovak Republic who wholeheartedly implemented the
deportation of Slovakian Jews to the Nazi death camps, and who was hanged as a war criminal in
1947. In an open letter to the chairman of the Slovak parliament, the People’s Party–Our Slovakia
called Tiso “a martyr of Slovakia’s sovereignty and a defender of Christianity against Bolshevism.”
The Baltic states and Ukraine have also been receptive soil for such initiatives to rehabilitate
individuals who took part in the deportation and murder of their Jewish neighbors. Such
manifestations have included demonstrations glorifying homegrown units of the Waffen-SS, and
naming streets for Nazi collaborators.
In Hungary, Budapest’s Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation (a) turns a blind eye to
the 1944 deportation and subsequent mass-murder of Hungarian Jews; (b) portrays Hungary as a
victim of Nazism rather than, for most of WWII, a willing ally of Nazi Germany; and (c) turns the
entire Hungarian nation and people into a victim of a foreign evil, utterly ignoring the fact that it was
primarily Hungarian policemen, not Germans, who rounded up Jews for deportation. Elsewhere in
the Hungarian capital, a museum called The House of Terror, opened in 2002, effectively places
Nazism on the same moral plane and in the same light as the post-WWII Communist regime, in
effect equating the latter’s secret police with Nazi Germany’s notorious SS. Equally if not even more
troubling, the House of Terror devotes substantially more space to Communist crimes than to the
genocide of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust. Moreover, it goes out of its way to highlight the
Jewish origins of some of those deemed responsible for the communist crimes. Meanwhile, the neo-
fascist Jobbik party has become a fixture on the Hungarian political scene, complete with harsh anti-
Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric.
Which is not to say that Hungarian governmental attempts to rewrite history have been without
consequences. Various initiatives in recent years by Hungarian officials to rehabilitate
Admiral Miklós Horthy, the wartime regent of Hungary and Hitler ally on whose watch around
440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in May-July 1944, have been met with sharp
criticism. In June of 2017, after Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban publicly referred to Horthy
as an “exceptional statesman,” World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder declared that “the
horrors that Admiral Horthy inflicted on the Jewish community of Hungary by stripping them of
their rights and their humanity, and his role in the deportation and murder of hundreds of
thousands of Jews, can never be excused.”
It is in this broader context of a disquieting trend to downplay if not totally ignore crimes against
humanity committed by domestic Nazi collaborators, both individuals and movements, during the
years of the Holocaust, that the Croatian Jewish community’s confrontation with the Croatian
authorities takes on special significance. The recasting of the Ustasha as national heroes and role
models has ominous connotations in a country and region where ethnic hatred and strife have had
catastrophic consequences, not just during WWII but more recently during the Balkan wars of the
1990s.
The publication in 2001 of Ivo and Slavko Goldstein’s meticulously researched The Holocaust in
Croatia makes it impossible for the Croatian authorities to claim ignorance of the Ustasha’s direct
responsibility for the genocides of Serbs, Jews, and Roma between 1941 and 1945. Indeed, this book,
which was published in English in 2016 by University of Pittsburgh Press in association with the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, should be required reading in all Croatian schools and at all Croatian
universities.
At a time when far-right politicians and ideologues like the above-mentioned former Croatian
minister of culture, Zlatko Hasanbegovićare, becoming increasingly brazen, if not overtly shameless,
in their attempts to write the crimes against humanity committed by the Ustasha out of their nation’s
history, the Croatian Jewish community deserves both respect and international support. Such
support should come not just from international Jewish organizations and other Jewish
communities, but from institutions and agencies around the world that are dedicated to the
preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and other genocides. These small and overdue steps are
necessary to prevent the re-creation of the xenophobic, hate-filled environment that allowed the
Holocaust and other genocides to occur in the first place.
***
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Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, and teaches about the law of genocide at
the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities. He is the editor of the recently published The World Jewish
Congress, 1936-2016.
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USTASHA WORLD WAR II
Rachel Cox, 'New Hair,' 2016, from her series 'Shiny Ghost,' which documented her grandmother's ﬁnal years.
(Courtesy Rachel Cox. Read more about 'Shiny Ghost,' which is available as a monograph, here.)
My mother, Inga, was 24 and living in Berlin when she won a Fulbright Fellowship and a Ford
Foundation grant to study political science in America. She caught the boat from Bremerhaven,
about four hours by train from where she grew up in Schleswig-Holstein, and, after a week at sea,
docked in Manhattan and made her way somewhat implausibly to Ithaca, New York. There she met
my father, an undergraduate at Cornell. They were both taking a class on constitutional law. The
story goes that one day Inga asked the room, “Does anyone mind if I open a window?” As a good
north German, she likes to feel the fresh air. In Ithaca in winter the temperature hovers around
nothing degrees. My father has minded for the past 55 years.
At the end of King Lear, Edgar addresses the court: “The oldest hath borne most,” he says. “We that
are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” In most ways, my parents have lived quiet and
conventional academic lives, but those lines make me think of them. My mother was 7 when the war
ended. The bedtime stories she told us of her childhood were war stories. My father, five years
younger, had a classic American small-town youth—he grew up in Middletown, New York, played
sandlot baseball and rooted for the Dodgers before they shifted to L.A. But when he married my
mother they both cut themselves off from their old lives and families. She, because she settled in
America, over 5,000 miles from home, at a time when the journey was mostly made by sea. And he,
because he married not just a Christian, but a German Christian, two decades after the war.
Inga, when I asked her for some background facts to write this piece, says that religion was never an
issue for them. Once at a restaurant she ordered a dish with bacon in it and offered him a bite. He
said, no thanks, I don’t eat bacon, but didn’t mention why. Of course she knew why but for some
reason it didn’t come up. Religion mattered to his parents, though, who met her for the first time at
his graduation. When they got married, four years later, no family from either side came to the
wedding. The deal that they struck with each other was that their kids would be raised Jewish, and
that they would grow up speaking German.
They had five of them—kids, I mean. Enough for a basketball team. Enough, also, that we didn’t need
any outside family to persuade us of who we were. We had a kind of island childhood, separated from
the mainland on both sides … and the island we grew up on was where the academic currents of our
parents’ lives had allowed them to drift ashore: Austin, Texas.
***
These days, my mother likes to say that the group of people she feels most comfortable around are
American Jews. Mutti, my German grandmother, once told her, sadly, “I wish I could say Jew the
way you do.” Without feeling shame, or worrying that what came across when she used the word was
the opposite of shame.
The rabbi came to dinner after I was born, to convert me officially. At least, that’s what my father
says. It didn’t seem to matter. By Austin standards, I was plenty Jewish enough for my reform
synagogue, where I learned the usual pidgin Hebrew for eight years of Sunday school (“Aba ba, Ima
ba’a”). At my bar mitzvah, or maybe it was my brother’s, we noticed at one point that the rabbi’s wife
had disappeared and eventually discovered her sitting in the car and listening to the Texas-
Oklahoma football game on the radio. That’s the kind of town it was. I didn’t know any Jewish kids
at school. What Jewishness offered us was not a community but a sense that we had a life, or at least
a history, elsewhere.
But I had other reminders. German may or may not have been my first language—by the time I
arrived on the scene, my brother had already started school. English, like the serpent, had entered
the garden. But we spoke German at home, and whenever we had guests, my brother and sisters
reverted to it as a form of secret communication. Darf ich noch ein Stück Kuchen haben? And still at
certain moments we slip into it with each other, to claim a kind of childish intimacy. My German is
rusty now and full of mistakes, but it feels like part of the hardware not software—it’s a language that
doesn’t need translation.
In other words, for us, Germanness and Jewishness turned out to be the same kind of thing … A
source of difference, connected to our parents and their childhoods, which we took pride in. There
was no split between them, no divide. At Christmas we bought a tree, and decorated it with real
beeswax candles, and exchanged presents on Christmas Eve, as Germans do … We sang
Schneeflöckchen, Weissröckchen and Maria durch ein’ Dornwald ging, with the lights off and the
candles lit in front of the living room fire. But we sang Mi Yimaleil, too, and Ma’oz Tzur, and played
dreidel as well as Müß, and received Hanukkah presents, squeezed into our shoes, which we set out
in the entrance hall every night, according to some fusion of Hanukkah and Nikolaustag that I still
can’t make sense of.
What Jewishness offered us was not a

community but a sense that we had a life,
or at least a history, elsewhere.
It’s strange how often the traditions overlapped. In Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March,
when Augie’s “Mama” touches him on the arm and says, “Gedenk, Augie, wenn ich bin todt!”, it’s
because of my German mother and not my Jewish father that the words strike home. And what we
spoke in the family was a kind of Yiddish, too—a mishmash. Pass the Apfelmus. Parents sell their
own childhoods to their kids, the good in them, so that you learn from these stories what counts as
funny and true … and both my mother and father sold us in their ways pictures of happy childhoods.
Even if the countries and cultures that produced them at the time were in the middle of a terrible
war, and their own parents distrusted each other and almost never interacted.
***
For some reason, I associated the German side of my family with the part of me that wanted to
become a writer. Every summer we flew to Flensburg, just on the Danish border, where my mom
grew up. Her grandparents’ house was still in the family, a trim postwar cottage built on a large plot
of land that stretched down, amid woods and apple trees, to the water: the Flensburger fjord. My
mother’s family had lived in the area for over a century. Our street, a dirt road shaded by tall planes
(you could see the sea between them), had been named by my great-grandmother. She called it Die
Schoene Aussicht, or pretty view, and for a long time relatives of mine owned most of the land on
either side. There were fields when I was a kid, but it’s all been developed now, and Die Schoene
Aussicht has become the Rodeo Drive of a provincial north German town—the best address in the
city. My grandparents’ cottage is a modest anomaly.
Schulthes is my mother’s maiden name. It means high-ranking official. My great-grandfather served

as finance minister for the city of Berlin. As kids, when we answered the phone in Flensburg, we said,
“Bei Schulthes”—because the name meant something in the neighborhood. A bust of some relative, I
don’t know who, stands on the antique bookcase in the living room, which also contains a 12-volume
edition of the complete works of Friedrich Schiller. (I never could get past the Gothic script.) My
grandmother acquired it during the war, in exchange for a tin of pork and apple sauce. These were
the sacrifices Schultheses made to culture. But they also seemed connected to other kinds of
tradition. A great aunt taught us mahjong. My grandfather kept a boat in the harbor—there was an
expectation that we’d become competent sailors. One summer, an uncle caught mussels from the
fjord in illegal nets and afterward his wife boiled them in a big pot outside on the terrace, but I was
too scared, and squeamish-American, to try one.
Somehow upstate New York never seemed as interesting. Partly because of the break with his
parents, after the marriage, I saw much less of my father’s side of the family. And besides, their roots
were elsewhere. They had named no streets. My dad’s dad was born in Hungary and moved to the
Lower East Side in 1907, when he was 2 months old. The family business was groceries. We visited
Middletown only once during my childhood, sleeping at my uncle’s house, and I got to stay up late to
watch Monday Night Football because the Cowboys were playing. Tony Dorsett scored on a 99-yard
run. There was a pinball machine in the basement den. These are the kind of things I remember.
It wasn’t till much later that I realized what a dumb kid I was. I hadn’t been paying attention. When,
in my 20s, I started reading novels for myself, including writers like Roth and Bellow, I saw how
close to my father’s experience their subject matter was. Especially Roth’s, whose memories of
Weequahic High sounded a lot like the stories of the kids my dad liked to talk about. It occurred to
me for the first time, cultural inheritance also looks like this—it’s not just busts of relatives and boats
in the harbor. My dad when we were children liked to keep what he called “a shit list,” a semi-joking,
semi-not way of referring to all the people that day who had pissed him off, of whom I was likely to
be one. These details are as useful to a novelist as mahjong. They’re even as useful as my mother’s
war stories. And not just because of their verbal invention, but because of the long history of self-
mocking frustration they suggest, which is still real frustration, with a world that hasn’t always
adapted to fit us.
When I was 13, my father’s mother, Granma Dot (short for Dorothy), came to live with us—more or
less until she died, which is more or less after I went to college. The reason she moved in is that she
had no choice. Her husband had died years before, and she was functionally blind after a botched
cataract operation. She was losing her words, too, as she put it, after a series of strokes, and either
chronically constipated or incontinent. As a kid all I knew was that she drank a lot of Metamucil and
went to the bathroom every five minutes. I didn’t like to touch her hands; they always seemed wet.
By this point, my mother’s relations with her were friendly but unintimate. Granma Dot had a lot of
manner, she sometimes sounded a little like Nancy Reagan. Very polite, very presented, even though
she was living in a kind of fog. She couldn’t see other people, she couldn’t really see how they saw
her. But my dad still had to fight all the old fights with her, they couldn’t help themselves. You don’t
outgrow this relationship, even if your mother is 80 years old, stuck in Texas with her Christian
daughter-in-law and her half-Jewish grandkids, looked after by the German au pair, in a climate
where she has to wear heavyweight sunglasses to protect her barely functioning eyes. Even if the
fight you’ve been fighting with her for most of your life, over my mother, is over. Granma had lost.
Yet my relationship with her had a real intensity. And if I’m a writer these days, much of whatever
self-control it requires I inherited from her. She used to teach high school French before she got
married (her bachelor’s was in French literature), and also played piano at the local cinema in the
silent-movie days of live soundtracks. These are the stories she told me, including the story of how
her husband died. “They said in the hospital, you can go home, and I thought—what home?” She
wasn’t always lucid, she couldn’t always string her thoughts together, so phrases like this that came
through clearly had a kind of shine on them, like coins you keep in your pocket and continually rub.
Because she couldn’t see, I used to read to her—anything I wanted, which meant in those days (my
plan was to be a poet) pages from the Oxford Book of English Verse. We sat on the patio outside my
bedroom door, in the shade of the crepe myrtle, on mild spring afternoons after school. I could never
tell if her eyes were open, her sunglasses were like a mask, but once after The Wasteland she
commented, “He likes his words too much.”
We even brought her with us to Germany on one of my mother’s sabbaticals. That’s how badly
Granma lost the argument. We had a small house in the Berlin suburbs and for one year of high
school I was almost as friendless as she. I hung around the living room, listening with her to the
books on tape my dad took out of the English-language section at the university library. (Which
included, incomprehensibly, Finnegan’s Wake.) She couldn’t see, she could talk straight, she had to
go to the bathroom all the time, she was living in the land of the Holocaust with the daughter-in-law
she did everything she could to prevent her son from marrying, and yet I used to watch her do her
exercises several times a day—marching up and down the living room with a self-mocking good
humor I recognized in my father, carrying in her hands two pink 3-pound jogging weights. The point
of the self-mockery was not to make fun of her real intentions but to disguise them. Even at that age,
at that stage, she had her vanity, and the self-discipline to see it through. If I sit down to my desk
every morning, to do this repetitive work, it comes from her.
***
Read an excerpt from Benjamin Markovits’ A Weekend in New York here.
Benjamin Markovits is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, A Weekend in New York. He lives in
London.
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