Hebrew Dreams in the Berlin of Yesterday: German-Jewish Symbiosis Fantasy on the City’s Streets in Lifney Hamakom by Haim Be’er and Avedot by Lea Goldberg

1 Introduction

In his essay The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, Amos Elon questions the relationship between Jewish and German culture. He describes, with some suspicion, the similarities between the cultures up until World War II. These similarities were also described by both Jewish and German intellectuals, such as Kafka who described how both Jews and Germans are “ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others.”^[1]

Elon continues by scorning the German-Jewish symbiosis as irrelevant for the current time:

At various times there has also been speculation – much of it rather tedious – […about] a ‘symbiosis.’ […] mostly [by] Jews. […] After the Holocaust, only penitent Germans evoked it, guilt-stricken and rueful over ‘their’ loss. Altogether, the idea of symbiosis was always suspect. Why does nobody ever speak of an American-Jewish, French-Jewish, or Dutch-Jewish symbiosis?^[2]

In this paper, I offer a different view of German-Jewish relations: as I will show, in Hebrew novels of the 20th and 21st centuries, a fantasy of German-Jewish symbiosis prevails, despite the understanding that this symbiosis is, in fact, impossible. This unique literary situation has more than one manifestation; I could illustrate it, for example, by examining stories of an unfulfilled love affair between the Jewish heroes and the German women they meet, which partially shapes the novels discussed below. But that would be to somewhat trivialise the situation. Instead, I will illustrate it in another way, by exploring the representation of space, which might tell a more complex story.

In the novels I discuss, Avedot (Losses) by Lea Goldberg,^[3] and Lifney Hamakom (Upon a Certain Place) by Haim Be’er,^[4] the fantasy of symbiosis underlines the image of Berlin. This exploration of Berlin’s representation as a space follows the work of Hebrew literature, history and culture scholars such as Zali Gurevitch, Yigal Schwartz and Maoz Azaryahu, who argue in different ways that the concept of ‘place’ in this culture tends to be bound to mythological patterns and images, bearing heavily symbolic and religious meanings.^[5] On this reading, the representation of the space of a city, like any other space, may challenge its realistic perception as a concrete background, foreshadowing the plot. The space is turned into a symbol of something – in our case, a symbol of fantasy, as well as the disappointment stemming from it.

Although written in different periods, Avedot and Lifney Hamakom reflect this tension quite similarly. Avedot was not published during its author’s lifetime; it was discovered in Goldberg’s archive and was probably written in the 1930s.^[6] Its plot takes place between 1932 and 1933, when the novel’s protagonist, the Hebrew poet Elchanan Kron, travels from Eretz Yisrael to Berlin in order to complete his scientific research. Lifney Hamakom, published in 2007, takes place in Berlin between 2005 and the summer of 2006; during the course of its plot the Second Lebanon War breaks out. It tells the story of a writer, the protagonist Haim Be’er (who shares his name with the actual author), who is frustrated has he cannot finish his novel. Zussman, a successful realtor, invites him to join a group of intellectuals convening in Berlin in order to determine the topic for a seminar honouring the memory of his daughter. While staying in Berlin, Be’er wanders the city with Shlomo Rapoport, an educated book collector.

Thus, it is difficult to avoid the similarities between these novels, even though they were written in different periods, with the later one being written without knowledge of the earlier one. In both novels, the protagonists are Hebrew writers who arrive in Berlin from Eretz Yisrael (or Mandatory Palestine) for a short time. They each have an unfulfilled love affair with a considerably younger German woman. And, most important for us here, the city is important to both, not only as a geographic landmark or temporary place of residence. It is charged with meanings for them. They wander the city, wondering about its future and culture. Be’er views the city in the light of the horrors of the past, while Kron foresees the changes to come.^[7] In a certain sense, and as we will see later, the urban space seems to represent the story of Jewish-German mutual relations.

2 German Jews and the German Metropolis

The fantasy of symbiosis that outlines the novel’s urban space is not confined to fiction. It is rooted in the history of Jews in Germany, the characteristics of the Weimar Republic and the nature of Berlin as a cosmopolitan city.^[8] It is worth mentioning, for instance, that both the journalist Amos Elon and the historian Michael Brenner see the arrival of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin as marking the onset of the German Jews’ modern age.^[9] Mendelssohn, the first German Jewish philosopher to be admired by non-Jewish intellectuals, was “the first of a long line of assimilated German Jews who admired German culture and civilization and whose enterprise, two centuries later, would come to a horrendous and abrupt end.”^[10] Hence, Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin signifies something deeper.

Clear evidence for the German Jews’ admiration of German culture is reflected in their pursuing after Goethe’s idea of Bildung – an aspiration for a multicultural society that admits of a rich cultural life to each individual, allowing them to shape their own life in a free, creative and autonomous manner. Furthermore, the society’s identity is determined by law and not by genetics.^[11] In fact, Bildung became the informal religion of German Jews, whose identity derived from the German language and culture.^[12] For many Jews Bildung was even synonymous with Jewishness itself.^[13] Goethe himself saw Bildung as being shared by both German and Jewish cultural practices centred around the idea of “Tikun Olam.”^[14] In one way or another, Germany, from the very beginning of modern times, was for some Jews more a universal ideal concept than a concrete location.

During the Weimar Republic, this universal ideal seems to have reached its peak. On the one hand, the condition of the Jews was never better than when they attained complete emancipation in a democratic republic. On the other, the republic’s politics tended to be unstable, with rising incidents of anti-Semitism. However, notwithstanding the rising violence, the Jews continued to support the republic and identify with the Bildungsideal.^[15] Elon describes the desperate situation of the German Jews when they were “caught in a vicious circle: the more they embraced the republic, the more it was discredited as a Judenrepublik.”^[16]

Weimar Berlin, as beautifully described by Boaz Neumann, represented the highlights of modern culture: fashion, cinema, LGBT culture, sexual liberation, psychoanalysis, hip cafés, and widespread political activity.^[17] Weimar Berlin symbolized the fulfilment of the Bildungsideal, of cosmopolitanism, just before its dark end. Against this background, it is noteworthy that early Nazi propaganda, already in 1933, used the image of the urban cosmopolitan liberal Jew as an enemy of the hardworking patriotic German, and thus connected the hatred towards the liberal metropolis with the hatred towards Jews.^[18] Joseph Roth described the origins of the connection between the Jews and the metropolis that appeared in this propaganda:

Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilization. They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin’s bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis.^[19]

Roth’s urbanist Jew becomes, then, the embodiment of the Jewish-German symbiosis fantasy; and it is, in fact, an urban fantasy: It contains the hope that human diversity will be integrated into a flexible culture which is only possible in a city like Berlin. As we will see, this fantasy has played a significant part in shaping the Hebrew literary conception of the city.

3 Looking Down on, and from Down Below: The City as a Literary Object (Methodological Notes)

If the literary city is our object of study, the question is how to approach it. The representation of the urban space in the novels discussed here will be examined by using two different views of the city, as explained by Michel de Certeau. The panoramic view, looking down on, enables an overall perspective, detached from the daily walks in the city’s streets.^[20] It could be seen as a type of distant reading, as defined by Franco Moretti, enabling us to focus on units that are either much smaller or much larger than the actual text.^[21] Turning the literary description of a space into a map, then, as I will show below, is an example of distant reading: The literary map is a visual analytical tool that organizes the text in a different way, that shows relations between the sites mentioned in the novel, thus enlightening the inner spatial logic of the narrative.^[22] Yet, it is not enough to look at the literary city only from above, only by distant reading of the text through a map. Because, in the course of their walking through the city, as represented in the novels, the characters, as well as the narrators, perceive the city in individual ways. And here, the view “from down below” parallels, and is comparable to, close reading. De Certeau describes the pedestrian’s point of view as chaotic and undermining the structured city map. The pedestrian moving from site to site in the city is described as a ‘speech act’, as he is acting out the space into language and creating relations between different locations.^[23] Like a language, walking has its own ‘rhetorical style’ – it creates a fragmented, ambiguous story that avoids coherent and comprehensive interpretation.^[24] De Certeau calls the experience of walking: “lacking of a place.”^[25] This chaotic, unaware walking, resembles the flâneur as described by Walter Benjamin. The walking of the flâneur is also “lacking of a place” and, unconscious, as he wanders the streets without a definite purpose, follows the temptations and memories which the streets arise. The flâneur is not a tourist but a local, and when he strolls through the streets, he experiences the fragmented realities of the modern city. He enjoys the diverse experiences of the city but is aware of the terrible social reality around him.^[26]

As I will demonstrate, those strategies of movement and reading have profound interpretational potential. The German-Jewish symbiosis fantasy and its downfall will be examined in light of the representation of space in both novels, using continuous integrative close and distant reading, combining different methods of interpretation, looking both down on and from down below, spatial mapping and structural narrative analysis.

4 Avedot – A City under a Crystal Ball

But I saw you today, anguished Europe, your wounds, your blood, your terrible ugliness. You stood before me as never before. As a most precious thing, as a beaten, and wounded child wallowing in its own blood. And I wanted to kiss all your wounds. You were once again in my Jewish eyes like Jesus on the cross, a martyr – not a saviour. No, not a saviour but a simple fool walking the path of misery.^[27]

This passage is taken from Lea Goldberg’s essay “Your Europe” published at the end of the Second World War. With that essay, Avedot forms part of Goldberg’s work mourning the loss of Europe. Goldberg, despite being raised in Lithuania, regarded herself as belonging to a Western European culture, and as a “provincial girl,” she longed for assimilation into the rich culture of the cosmopolitan European city.^[28] She arrived in Berlin in 1930, two years before Avedot’s fictional protagonist Elchanan Kron, and, like for him, her destination was the Humboldt University.^[29] Her arrival in Berlin marked a new beginning for her:

I am in Berlin – I have been here a whole month. Which is saying an awful lot: it means I have left Kovno; it means no more grey boredom; it means I can believe in the changes in my life and breathe easily. Lightness – how many years have I prayed for a bit of lightness, a bit of simple joy, for days spent smiling for no reason; and now those days have finally arrived. They have arrived.^[30]

The fast rhythm of the opening of the passage is replaced with a long and breathy sentence that conveys the feeling of “lightness” and easy arrival in Berlin. Nevertheless, as Maya Barzilai has pointed out, Goldberg arrived in Berlin too late, a decade after the peak of Hebrew Literature in the 1920s,^[31] when Hayim Nahman Bialik, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, and Shaul Tchernichovsky lived in the city.^[32] Even though Goldberg left Berlin in 1932, she still witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rising hatred on Berlin’s streets.

Avedot was first published by Giddon Ticotsky in 2010 but it takes place over the course of a year, 1932–1933,^[33] and describes the story of the poet Elchanan Kron, who travels from Eretz Yisrael to Berlin in order to complete his academic work. Research discussing Avedot emphasizes the centrality of the loss motif.^[34] And indeed the loss of the big city and the loss of European culture and Hebrew literature in it, are quite evident. As Goldberg writes in the novel’s opening, Berlin is “this solid city hanging by a thread, the city of peace and liberty on the edge of the abyss.”^[35]

However, I would like to argue that, aside from portraying the disintegrating city, Goldberg portrays Berlin as a literary postcard of farewell, or, if you like, as the literary equivalent of the familiar snow globe souvenir. This is the city that Goldberg had longed for since childhood, the intellectual cosmopolitan city that she loved and cherished, albeit for a short while.

Clear evidence for this can be seen from a panoramic view of the city as outlined in its literary map. Franco Moretti asserted the interpretational potential of the literary map: it reduces the narrative into an artificial object helping us to focus on the connections between sites – connections that are as important as each site on its own.^[36] In our case, contrary to literary conventions that portray protagonists wandering in modern city streets, the map of Goldberg’s novel is not one of wandering; it is a map of measured and calculated spatial framing. (Map 1)

Map 1:

The sites mentioned in Avedot.

The first map presents the sites that Kron visits, numbered according to the order in which they appear in the plot: 1. Berlin Hauptbahnhof. 2. Grünau. 3. Der Tiergarten. 4. Litzensee Park. 5. Humboldt-Universität6. Lehrterstraße. 7. Friedrichstraße. 8. Grenadirstraße – the Jewish Street, today called Almstadtstraße. 9. Bahnhof Berlin-Charlottenburg. 10. St.-Hedwigs-Kathedrale.

Clearly, besides Grünau (where Antonia and Kron arrive by train, and from where they return to the centre of Berlin), the sites are relatively close to one another. In fact, Goldberg focuses on a narrow area of the city, an area with specific characteristics: the university, public parks and train stations.

The map outlined is highly selective and fragmented. On the one hand, as Barzilai argues, Goldberg mentions the names of sites and thereby to some extent provides an orientation. On the other hand, it is very sketchy: Goldberg does not mention all of the exact locations of cafés and the characters’ homes.^[37] It is as if the narrative were undermining spatial continuity when Kron ends up in an unknown place. In fact, the deficient map emphasizes the few sites on it, the ones that were important to the author, by focusing on them, making them memorable to the reader. Actually, the ‘real’ Berlin is not what is represented in Avedot, but rather a city that the narrator longed for.

Adding another layer of the routes depicted in the novel contributes to the realization of a frozen-crystallized city. (Map 2)

Map 2:

The walking routes in Avedot.

One can assume that in any urban wandering novel, there will be a variety of routes, and maybe even no single central point. But what clearly stands out here are the very few routes, and the centrality of the university (that does not link all the routes).^[38] This geographic centrality demonstrates the thematic central role of the university in the plot: Kron has arrived in Berlin to finish his academic research and therefore the university is his professional and social milieu. Nevertheless, the centrality of the university, and the routes that lead to it, shape the image of Berlin as an intellectual cosmopolitan city. In other words, this is not what strolling in the city looks like.

We can think for example of Berlin, Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1929), another novel, written at about the same time in Berlin. As opposed to Avedot, the urban space in Berlin, Alexanderplatz is not selective at all, and therefore conveys a much stronger sense of urbanity, as being hectic and chaotic. This can be seen in the map below taken from the project “Novel City Map.”^[39] The map, although more artistically designed than the one above, accurately illustrates the extent of Franz Biberkopf’s strolling in the city. (Map 3)

Map 3:

Berlin Alexanderplatz’s literary map.

Even though the maps are different in appearance, they both represent the stroll in the cities of the two protagonists, and some conclusions can be reached in light of the comparison. Döblin’s novel map is spread over many areas of the city and is therefore less selective. Moreover, it seems that Biberkopf is moving in a more hectic manner than Kron: we can see all sorts of walking patterns between different places, as opposed to Avedot, where, as mentioned earlier, the walking in the novel is mainly toward the university. Berlin, Alexanderplatz, therefore, provides a completely different perspective on the same city, and, with it, a completely different perception of urban experience.

The crystallised view of the city that emerges from the panoramic view, can also be seen from ‘looking from down below,’ or from a close reading point of view. In fact, most of the narrative takes place in the characters’ homes or in public areas and is spent in staying put rather than in walking. In contrast to Benjamin’s flâneur, Kron does not turn the street into a home, as he does not spend much time exploring the urban space. He prefers visiting his friends in their homes or spending time in cafés, attending lectures at the university, or sitting in the public gardens. In other words, there is an incompatibility between the appearance of a big hectic city and the sense of homeliness that the text creates. In fact, the big city has become small and familiar.^[40]

To analyse whether the few descriptions of wandering in the city portray an urban flâneur who experiences fragmented reality in Berlin, or whether they demonstrate, as I argue here, a somewhat lyrical and poetic mode, I will compare the first description of wandering in the novel to the first description of wandering in Going to the Dogs: A Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner (1931).^[41] First, because the latter was also written about the same time in Berlin, and second, because, like Berlin, Alexanderplatz, it is an urban novel that represents hectic wandering in Berlin.^[42]

Avedot:

Like a great, wounded raven, evening descended on the city. Immediately the streetlamps burst through the darkness, and like frisky dogs licked the smooth asphalt with their long and thirsty tongues, chasing, cheerfully barking after every car on the street, trying to bite off the tops of the tender buds on the linden trees; jumping along the river under the arches of the bridge, as an agile squirrel hopping from branch to branch. Only, there was no bridge in that part of the city, and nor was a river there. Square, imposing houses, cast their shadow over the street.^[43]

The somewhat surreal atmosphere becomes a bit more concrete but still retains its lyrical poetic quality:

The light spring wind carried a smell of dust and gasoline. People hurried, more than usual. And the voice of the lame woman, calling out the name of some dubious magazine from the corner of the street. […] He knew: far away in the villages, the cats, only too familiar with loneliness, yowl. In the metropolis, people take a walk to the cafés. They also know the meaning of death. And then spring entered the cafe.^[44]

Now, let’s compare this to the first description of wandering in Going to the Dogs:

Fabian placed a mark on the table and left the café. He had no notion where he was. If you board a No. 1 bus at Wittenberg-Platz, get out at Potsdam Bridge and take a tram, without knowing its destination, only to leave it twenty minutes later because a woman suddenly gets in who bears a resemblance to Frederick the Great, you cannot be expected to know where you are.^[45]

He then stops trying to navigate and decides to follow the mob:

He followed three workmen who were striding along at a good pace, stumbled over planks of wood, passed hoardings and grey, dubious hotels and arrived at Jannowitz Bridge Station. In the train, he found the address which Bertuch, the manager at his office, had written down for him: 23 Schlüterstraße, Frau Sommer. He got out at the Zoo. In the Joachimsthaler Straße, a thin-legged young lady, rising and falling on her toes, asked him what about it. He rejected her advances, wagged his finger at her and escaped.^[46]

The two segments seem similar: they are both led by an omniscient narrator, viewing the same city’s streets. But this is where the similarity ends. One needs only a brief reading to feel the differences in the atmosphere: Avedot creates a slow, lyrical, calm and organised rhythm,^[47] whereas the segment from Going to the Dogs is hectic, creating a sense of disorientation: “He had no notion where he was.”

Indeed, Kron’s gaze is characterized by its slow pace, slowly and deliberately describing the streets, giving the view a symbolic significance, like the existential loneliness of the people in the café. On the other hand, Fabian’s thoughts and steps are much more associative. He is trying to reach a certain address but does not know how he will get there. He changes trams for random reasons and follows other pedestrians. It is a classic example of disrupting the city’s order as de Certeau explained, when Fabian refuses to obey the shortest, structured route to his destination.^[48] His walking is disrupted by the mob that cannot be ignored, while in Avedot “People hurried, more than the usual,” but without interrupting Kron’s slow gaze on the city.

We should look also at the orientation in the city: while the segment from Going to the Dogs is filled with street names and sites, the segment from Avedot lacks even one concrete reference. It could be a description of any city, and not only of Berlin. This is in fact a poetic representation of a universal experience of a young man in the bustling city of the 1930s, a symbol of loneliness in the modern metropole, more than a specific wandering in specific streets.

Thus, while Going to the dogs represents the fragmented modern reality of Weimar Berlin – the fast rhythm, the mob, the sights, represent the city ‘as is,’ without a sublime sense of wandering in it – Avedot, in its sad lyrical loneliness, clings to an image of the city that once existed, and is now gone.^[49]

Another unexpected phenomenon in the novel could add to the crystallized image of Berlin: the manner in which Nazism rises in the city, both spatially and temporally. In fact, from Figure 1,^[50] it is apparent that Berlin is described as a city with Nazi violence only at the end of the novel, with the result of the 1933 elections and the Reichstag fire. Even though this aligns with the narrative, it is nonetheless surprising, as the narrative describes anti-Semitism and the Nazis gaining power across Germany from the very beginning.

Figure 1:

Descriptions of anti-Semitism in Berlin axis X presents the ‘timeline’ of the novel (the segments are divided by CATMA and do not have narratological meaning) and axis Y presents both the frequency of manual-based annotations and their proportional volume in each segment of the narrative. Here, these are annotations of descriptions of anti-Semitism in Berlin. Clearly, all of them appear only at the end of the novel, and their numbers increase rapidly.

This interesting finding invites further reading of the different descriptions of anti-Semitism and Nazi activity in the novel. It seems that in the first part of the novel there are no descriptions of such activity occurring in Berlin itself, since they actually occur outside the city: the sign forbidding foreigners to enter Neubabelsberg lake, which Kron mentions in his conversation with Berson;^[51] the Nazi flag hanging outside the house of Rüdiger’s family near the border with Poland;^[52] Elizabeth’s partner who lives with her outside Berlin and one day leaves her to join the Nazi party.^[53]

Following the spread of Nazism and anti-Semitism throughout Germany, it burst into Berlin, first blaming Jewish researchers for plagiarism, and then assassinating Prof. Braka because of his liberal views. Germany’s Reichstag fire completed the Nazi occupation of Berlin’s streets. It is interesting that Kron was staying outside Berlin when the Reichstag fire occurs. At the time, he was travelling to the Harz mountain area to meet Antonia and begin their love affair. One cannot ignore the symbolism of this tragic “coincidence”: just when Kron is willing to give his love for a young German woman a second chance, symbolising the willingness to give Berlin a second chance, the worst of all happens, and the window for symbiosis has been shut. Kron is able to look at the city from an even more distant point of view by staying outside of it at the time. He refuses to believe the city has changed, because:

A man is made in such a way that he loves a little bit every country whose language he knows – and Kron had managed to love deeply this city that caused him so much grief. Which is why he is angry now, and why he refuses to understand; and why he does not want to admit to the sheer illogicality of all of this. Ribono shel Olam!^[54]

The panoramic view from above, and the view of the city from below; the literary map of Berlin, and the descriptions of wandering through the city – all portray a picture of a seemingly big and lonely city. It appears, however, that underneath that image lies a crystallised image of the city – beautiful, cold, tender – whose future, according to the end of the novel, will be one of utter failure. It appears as though the dreadful ending is being held back, outside the city, in a way that allows the city itself to maintain its beautiful image intact a little while longer. The poetics of Avedot, in other words, preserve the dazzling view of the city, one that barely survives until the wave of hate sweeps the city, breaks its crystallised image, and changes the face of Berlin and Europe forever.

5 Lifney Hamakom: A City Under a Mass of Symbols

In his Autobiography, Stephan Zweig wrote:

For this was something on the credit side that distinguished the First world War from the Second – words were still powerful then. They had not yet been devalued by the systematic lies of the propaganda. People still took notice of the written word and looked forward to reading it […] The moral conscience of the world was not yet as exhausted and drained as it is today; it reacted vehemently, with all the force of centuries of conviction, to every obvious lie, every transgression against international law and common humanity.^[55]

The power of words in the face of the abyss is in fact the idea around which Lifney Hamakom turns, and which shapes its literary map. Thus, if in Avedot the selective nature of the city’s map creates a connection between the idea of cosmopolitanism and a concrete location, the literary map which is depicted in Lifney Hamakom presents Berlin’s image as neither realistic nor concrete. (Map 4)

Map 4:

The sites mentioned in Lifney Hamakom

The following map presents the 28 sites that Haim Be’er visits during the course of the novel: 1. Savignyplatz. 2. Literaturhaus. 3. Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. 4. Am Bahnhof Grunewald. 5. Winklerstraße. 6. Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld.^[56] 7. Fernsehturm. 8. Brandenburger Tor. 9. Der Tiergarten. 10. Bahnhof Berlin Friedrichstraße. 11. Unter den Linden. 12. Bebelplatz. 13. Deutsche Oper Berlin. 14. St.-Hedwigs-Kathedrale. 15. Deutsche Bank. 16. Bibliothek. 17. Am Großen Wannsee. 18. Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus. 19. Führerbunker 20. Flughafen Berlin-Tempelhof. 21. Topographie des Terrors. 22. Olympiastadion. 23. Hannah-Arendt-Straße and Wilhelmstraße. 24. Hotel Adlon. 25. Pariser Platz. 26. Oranienburgerstraße. 27. Martinstraße 9. 28. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Seemingly, a lot of places appear, and, unlike Avedot, the novel enables a full orientation of the city, a fact that itself supports the realistic framework of the novel. Nevertheless, it can be easily identified that most of the spots on the maps are monuments or historical sites, to which Be’er travels with Rapoport, such as the Empty Library, the Topography of Terror monument, the Führerbunker, and so forth.

Even though the map is spread over various areas of the city, it is guided by a single definite rule: the memory of the Holocaust. Despite the many sites mentioned in the novel, the plot barely moves between them, as it mostly takes place in the literary colloquium and in cafés, whose specific locations go unmentioned. Similar to Avedot, the fact that most of the plot takes place indoors marks outdoor events as the exception. This draws one to the conclusion that neither novel is an urban novel in the fullest sense of the term, since neither describes diverse experiences of the city. In other words, it can be argued that the story of the novel does not unfold in a spatial horizontal manner, but in a vertical one: thus, the focus of the novel is on the intellectual symbolic experience of memory,^[57] as manifested in the ‘Empty Library’ by Micha Ullman that appears on the novel’s cover.

This can also be seen through close reading. The wandering segments in the novel are purposeful, moving towards a definite location, mostly towards a historical site or a monument. The actual space is scarcely described, and the wanderings are accompanied by intellectual debates that expropriate the space from its realistic function. Here, for example, is Be’er’s and Rapoport’s first tour in Berlin:

“A decent place, Grunewald, indeed decent he muttered as we arrived at his home-suburb, walking in the tunnel under the railroad track above us. […] Quietly, Rapoport signalled to me to follow him, as the light from his torch hovered upwards to the stairs. The platform was deserted, and a dark and burdening silence weighed heavily upon it.”

“What platform is this?” I asked with a kind of dread.

Platform 17.

And where does one travel to from here?

“Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen” Rapoport announced monotonically, like the train announcements where the names of all destinations are relayed in the same dull monotone, and he traced a circle around us with the light from his torch.^[58]

On this tour, Rapoport ‘puts on a show’: he creates a dramatic setting and becomes a morbid storyteller. Rapoport uses the space as a method for the intended lesson: his decision to live near the train platform from where his father was sent to a concentration camp places the past as a perpetual monument. The present cannot be just the present, and nor should it be.

As opposed to Rapoport’s guided tour, when he travels to Berlin a year later, Be’er allows himself to walk slowly in the city. Here Be’er travels to Steglitz, to Rapoport’s late father’s printing press, a place Rapoport has refused to visit:

It seemed like time had not touched Martinstraße. Well-kept buildings of four or five storeys, painted in light colours of grey-blue and pink, shut in the street from both sides. Chestnuts and plain trees growing in front of the houses, cast their shadow over the street. […] Every time a car passed by, the sound of its wheels on the road became mingled with the sound of the blackbirds. Martinstraße number 10 had gone, making way for a playground for the neighbours’ children: a rocking horse, swings, a small maze, and a slide.^[59]

Arriving at a place that Rapoport refused to visit is to allow it to be explored in light of the current moment, pausing over certain details: pedestrians, buildings, trees and birds, experiencing this pleasant urban neighbourhood. But the time anticipates what is already known: that the wandering in Berlin cannot avoid the hidden past:

Had the house that had once stood there been destroyed by an Allied shell? Or perhaps there had never been a house there. […] It seemed like number 9, painted in ochre, remained as it was in the 20s and 30s […]. At the corner of the street, under a canopy of green-red-white, a family was happily receiving spaghetti Bolognese and pizza casa mia. I entered the Italian trattoria and asked for a Campari.

“Would you like it neat or mixed with orange juice?” the waiter asked.

I preferred the Campari neat, to preserve its natural bitterness and original scarlet colour. It felt like this would be the most fitting drink for the occasion, a private memorial ceremony for the people of the Berlin Hebrew book society, who had lived and worked at the end of this very street seventy or eighty years ago.^[60]

The urban idyll, then, is merely a cover for the main event: the past. Despite the everyday situation, the point of raising a glass in a restaurant is to conduct a private memorial ceremony.

“Goyishe Naches” is Rapoport’s description for the only cultural experience he and Be’er share in Berlin: attending an opera.^[61] In fact, they have arrived at the location at the heart of the novel – Bebelplatz – which represents the tragedy of the Jewish people. There, they are trying to enjoy the best of European culture, but obviously this “Goyishe Naches,” or symbiosis if you like, is impossible in Berlin; wandering in it through the eyes of the present is impossible when the pain of the past is what is actually guiding one’s steps.

As noted above, due to the fantasy of symbiosis, the novel does not allow for a concrete experience of the city on a horizontal plane, when narrative realism collapses or becomes distorted under the weight of “vertical” symbols. Additionally, the fantasy of symbiosis not only “collapses” realism but also lies at the heart of the symbols’ entanglement which Be’er places on Berlin’s streets, and especially the ‘Empty Library’ that stands at the heart of the city, offering “Goyishe Naches.”^[62]

The central motif of the novel is the book burning, which has a spatial significance since the action returns to both the Opera square and the Empty Library. Nevertheless, the novel undermines Heinrich Heine’s antiquated statement: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn humans too.” The book burning act does not register as a warning for future events, but as a major event on its own which shows an attempt to destroy a culture, to destroy its library, and in that way, to bring about a spiritual destruction which is worse than a physical one.^[63] Furthermore, the book fire is described as “the parchment burning and its letters flying up to heaven,” an idiom from the Babylonian Talmud (Avoda Zara, 18b) that aims to distinguish between the material quality of the written book and the Torah, which is not substance but spirit, as Be’er explains to Katerina, a young German researcher and Be’er’s unfulfilled love object:^[64]

At the heart of the story lies the belief that the world in which we live is not the only existing reality, but that somewhere, hidden from view, lies a different, superior by far and truer world, from which new life will flourish. And just as when, at the time of death, the soul departs from the body and soars up to reunite with the God of the spirits who will, in the fullness of time, place such soul in a different body, so the words and letters depart from the broken tablets and the burned parchment and pages, and soar into the air and return to their origin in the lap of God, where they had once entertained Him in His loneliness before ever creation began, and He will send and return them at a time of His choosing to the pens and computers of authors and scholars.^[65]

Fire, in fact, burns the substance, thereby destroying the mediation between man and God. The Empty Library demonstrates this idea in a fundamental way: the substance is removed, and now it is only the words rising to the skies that represent God. The fire of books, then, paradoxically creates a living fantasy of being able to communicate with God without a mediator. Hades and God are both nowhere;^[66] the book fire moves between the awful and the divine as an alternative to Bildung and the fantasy of symbiosis.

As the flames rise from the burning books, there is a comparison between fire and water, the two opposite elements. When Katrina and Be’er sit in a café at Savignyplatz to resolve the narrative’s conflicts, she makes this comparison. In this conversation they discuss the mythological creature “part dragon part whale” that sometimes appears in traditional Jewish art (in synagogues, on challah covers, on the gates of medieval communities etc.).^[67] Katerina shows Be’er how she concluded that this figure is similar to the ancient German dragon that suffocates Worms and aims to destroy it. She points out how this German mythological figure became transformed into the Jewish tradition:

After the excitement had subsided a bit, Katrina explained that the greatness of those unknown Jewish artists lay in the dramatic transfiguration they engineered in the Rein’s Lindwurm. Once the threatening dragon had been inserted under the wings of the Shekhinah and made Jewish, it could become transformed into a likeable whale, like a pet of God, whose flesh is to be served as the first course to the Tzadikim in heaven during the feast where the Messiah himself is to be the honoured guest.^[68]

Thus, the dragon, the symbol of fire and the German horrors, became a friendly whale. It symbolizes the universal nature of the divine, which has no place, similar to the Jewish people – the wanderers, the unlocated. The whale is in fact the symbol for the Bildungsideal, a symbol for a cosmopolitan European fantasy. Fire, then, is the substance that burns, the quality of nations with a homeland. Liquid, on the other hand, is limitless, allowing them to continue wandering, until they are forced to stop.

According to Benjamin, strolling through the city exposes urban reality – the present as well as the memories of the past. The flâneur can walk through the stories that the streets give rise to. In a way, strolling in Berlin of Lifney Hamakom, is similar to the flâneur’s experience, as he bumps against both concrete and symbolic pits, revealing vertical and mythological axes that raise existential questions about the essence of God. But on another level, Benjamin’s flâneur leaves behind the tension between the concrete and the mythological, as he walks through the streets with no concrete guidance but his own inner desires and thoughts. In Lifney Hamakom it seems that the present as well as the unintentional strolling cannot exist, as a concrete “symbiosis” is not feasible even for one night just to enjoy “pleasure from the one and only Wolfgang Amadeus.”^[69]

6 Conclusions

This article attempts to demonstrate how the German-Jewish symbiosis fantasy, as described by historians, prevails in Berlin’s urban space in the novels Lifney Hamakom and Avedot. If Avedot freezes the city as an image of potential symbiosis, Lifney Hamakom is significantly affected by the mass of symbols of the city’s space – in both novels undermining the literary representation of Berlin as an actual living city. The novels express an intellectual passion to merge with the city’s space. Although Elchanan Kron seems a typical detached Jewish protagonist who is alone in the big city in the 1930s, he is actually longing to be part of the academic and intellectual life of the city: attending lectures at the university, enjoying the fresh air in the city’s gardens, or sitting in a café. The lyrical gaze of Kron as he strolls through the city conjures up fond memories of the beloved city that is now lost. Even though the motif of loss and the atmosphere of the horrors yet to come play an undeniable part in this novel, my argument is that underneath this appearance, the image of Berlin which the novel presents is trying to save the city just before it plunges into abyss. It is thus like the souvenir of a snow globe, a city encased in a crystal ball upon which gentle snowflakes settle. The city’s literary map rises from Avedot, showing how Goldberg connected the cosmopolitan ideal to a concrete location, the Berlin of her childhood fantasy.

As opposed to Avedot, Lifney Hamakom’s literary map shows that the novel almost does not allow a horizontal experience of the city. The literary city is loaded with symbols, which force the reader to explore it from a vertical perspective. As much as it is true that Be’er and Rapoport yearn to enjoy some “Goyishe Naches,” writing the novel through the symbol of the Empty Library raises the possibility of living without books, libraries, temples, or even prayer; the possibility of eliminating the notion of God from history and replacing it with some kind of abstract faith. The German space is paradoxically the one that enables such faith; the violence and brutality of the book fire is the force that drives humanity into the abyss, to the stairs of Hades, to the stairs of the Empty Library: it establishes God in nowhere.^[70] As opposed to Elon’s belief, with which I opened this paper, the German-Jewish symbiosis – as these novels tell us – is destined to remain an open, bleeding wound.