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caust did not want to visit Germany. Death remained for them a master
from Germany, as Celan put it. How could one forget such a trauma?
And still, despite the apocalyptic horror, the German-Jewish rela–
tionship found no "Final Solution," even after the Holocaust. Three
weeks before Hitler's seizure of power, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl
Jaspers that no position on the Jewish question, be it assimilationist,
Zionist, or anti-Semitic, could solve the problem. Twenty years later,
though, after the Holocaust, she was to explain to Jaspers that she still
remained "German" and was not willing to construct for herself a false
Jewish or American past.
These oddities exist not only in the case of an intellectual with so def–
inite a German background as Arendt's. A year after their return from
the camp at Transnistria, my parents hired a private German language
teacher for me! We lived in Radauti, a picturesque Bukovinian town in
which the Jewish population, as many of them as were still left, spoke
German, just like educated Romanians. Our deportation to Transnistria
had been committed by Romanian authorities, but the parents who so
quickly engaged a German teacher for their son knew only too well who
had set the infernal machinery of genocide in motion.
[ belong to those who took upon themselves the encounter with post–
war Germany. I hoped that National Socialism didn't affect the "entire"
German history.
J
rather thought that Nazism didn't reduce it
to
a com–
mon denominator, but I also knew that it was not completely extrinsic
to the German "nation," as the Communists claimed. Contrary to Mar–
tin Walser, I think the consciousness of guilt doesn't have only negative
effects. I see the German question in a larger context, that of the human.
In no way does this imply an optimistic vision, rather the contrary. I
often recall Mark Twain's words: "I am quite sure that I have no race
prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices.
Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that
a man is a human being-that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."
EK: You left Romania in 1987 and went to West Berlin. How did your
encounter with the democratic, postwar Germany play out?
NM: A great monster by the name of Berlin plagued the fantasies of my
childhood. At the age of five, on my way to the camp, the war-like word
"Berlin" brutally crushed my innocence. At the age of fifty, the aggres–
sive Berlin meant to me the jump over the wall of the socialist camp.
After the Holocaust and Communist totalitarianism, West Berlin
marked the beginning of a complementary experience: exile. In a free
