Post #105: How Do You Say Portnoy in German?

31 March 2024 (Easter Sunday)

“Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass! But you are a Jew, my sister says. You are a Jewish boy, more than you know, and all you're doing is making yourself miserable, all you're doing is hollering into the wind…”

—Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

     For as long as I can remember, save perhaps the very first years of childhood, I remember feeling acutely uncomfortable with being German—to the point of believing, in all seriousness, that surely all other nationalities had something to recommend them, save mine. The peculiarities of the island-perspective from wall-bound West Berlin had something to do with this, no doubt (see #101), as did unfavorable comparison with my more interesting-seeming American schoolmates; but primarily it was the fruit of history, or perhaps more specifically, of the new pedagogy of making historical amends by any and all means—freshly instituted just in time for my school days and particularly prevalent in my parents’ social circles. As they (both born in 1947) were the generation to clean the slate and inscribe something redeeming upon it, so we, the generation of their children, were to be the proud exemplars of what was possible by way of historical about-faces.

     It should be obvious that such an ambitious maneuver must produce complications aplenty, especially when executed upon particularly poisoned ground (I would, these days, hesitate to say uniquely, given the charnel house that is history, but at the time it was always understood to be so). Nor is it possible ever to extricate oneself again completely, once one has been so thoroughly enmeshed. Although it is in many ways unfair to force German history into such brutally narrow and damning terms, I have often thought of it as a kind of Black Hole that swallows up all light around it and distorts the very space by its terrible gravity. To see things in such a dim light (or, at first, to sense something of the dark undertow beneath what is presented as a process of political enlightenment) is to begin looking for an escape, I would say in retrospect. Be that as it may, I took the first exit I could.

     Thus, as soon as I had finished with my hybrid high school (seven years at the time, hence at 19, after six years of elementary school at the same place), I made for England, with no intention of turning back again, ever. It was uncertain for many years whether I would be able to pull this off, since my parents, though resolute reformers and cosmopolitans, were and are nonetheless quite rooted Germans, to whom it was not at all obvious, even family considerations apart, why their son should exile himself rather than return to the more usual educational channels in Germany with his Oxford BA in hand. I dreaded nothing more, however, and managed, by desperate daredevil acrobatics for many years, first to leverage the BA into a grad-school spot in California (helped during the first year with a gift from my grandfather to cover out-of-state tuition), thence to make my way, one breakneck step at a time, by the grace of Fortuna and a Himalayan mountain range of credit card debt, to a PhD from the University of Toronto (via UCLA and NYU) on the eve of my thirtieth birthday. I married a Canadian just after Christmas, got my “green card” to the True North Strong and Free via the point system (without the help of a lawyer), and had thereby completed my escape.

     Or so I thought. Until a dozen years later my Canadian life fell apart, along with my marriage, and the prodigal son had to go “home” for a few months—that is, retreat in defeat to the last refuge he had left in the world. To my parents’ great credit they played their part in the best Biblical spirit, fatted calf and all, though I was an emotional wreck in no mood for festivities, only my poverty and desperation consenting to a return under biographical duress—the “graveyard of my dreams,” as I put it to myself at the time. But this too passed, the gloom gradually lifted again, and I went to Barcelona to train as an English teacher and put my life back together. The lights came back on soon after in the form of a year in Bhutan and then my move to Bangkok, seven years ago, did the rest to put me back properly on my feet. But these are only the incidentals, meant for background and illustration, and what I am really trying to get at is something else: namely that no matter how early and eagerly I began reinventing myself, via the English language, and how thoroughly I erased most traces of my origins, not only from my accent but even from my name (via my French-Canadian wife), there is no way I could ever fully escape my Germanness.

     All it takes is one simple question, which I resent accordingly: “Where are you from?” How I wish I were not always asked this—quite beside the point as it seems to me. Can you please, for once, ask me who I am, or maybe where I am going? But no, where are you from, to which, again and again, I am forced to give an answer I loathe and that I disavow with all my heart. No, I am not German in the sense that will get pinned on me as soon as I give the straight answer (and who wants to hear the long one in casual conversation?). I haven’t voted there in twenty years, mail-in ballots or not; I’ve lived there continuously only for a few desperate months in over thirty years; I am not comfortable there, nor partial to my supposed countrymen abroad. The passport is strictly a necessity to me, and I would much prefer one issued by the Republic of Venice, the Vatican, or the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

     I’m still grateful for my ability to read the language, but I can’t say that I feel any great emotional attachment to it; or if I did, it would be in an ancestral and literary sense that has no particular connection to the 21st century, that crosses borders freely and leaves me appreciating Stefan Zweig and Max Frisch no less than Herman Hesse or Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Sigmund Freud (as a stylist) no less than Arthur Schopenhauer. How this might imply any commitment to the contemporary Federal Republic, West or East, North or South, is not evident to me. That I have not been writing in German either since I left high school, or only in a strictly personal way to my friends, must surely count for something, and even my orthography when I do is not the one that was imposed, in the usual top-down manner, shortly after I left. Not for me a language, or rather a society, that regulates, by force of law, where every last comma must be placed.

     I do not drink beer, I care nothing for cars or soccer, I go to Bavaria as a tourist, if at all, and to Berlin as a tortured soul only; I am not attracted to German women, I do not follow German news or read any of their papers, preferring the Neue Zürcher Zeitung even to the Frankfurter Allgemeine. I want, in short, nothing to do with the outfit, though I am not willing to say that it is objectively worse than anywhere else, and quite willing to consider that in some respects, not by my standards but by reasonable ones, it may even be quite nice. If you go to Britain in search of infrastructural amenities or reliable creature comforts, and you are not a lord or a millionaire, you are very naïve indeed. In that respect, you might find yourself better off in an old German steel town than in London. But lo, if you went looking far and wide in Germany for the kind of unforced elegance that one can still find in Britain without doing much to seek it out, then you would find yourself on even more of a fool’s errand—a consideration that does not seem to weigh on many of my so-called countrymen the way it does on me.

     To make us love our country, wrote Burke, it ought to be lovely. That is not an easy test to pass with concentration camps in mind. But it is also an unfair way to frame the issue. For such a self-loathing perspective, which made me believe as a child that any nationality would be better than my own, also depends on a distortion. The loveliness in question relies everywhere on casting the things of the past in a flattering light, and not knowing as well as at home where a foreign culture buries its skeletons. Turn the search-lights up enough, or deploy the X-rays if necessary, and the ugly side comes to view everywhere. Not that the scale is always comparable, though even there the competition is depressingly stiff, but that the Beast does not depend on numbers to make its presence felt.

     In sad sum, I can distance myself all I want (and surely that does count for something), and still any Tom, Dick, or Harry is able to outmaneuver me with a simple question, and every Smith or Murray can still get to me with the usual tired pinpricks. (No, Douglas, the Germans, eighty years on, are not the same bullies as ever, having merely exchanged their wolf’s skins for sheep’s clothing. You should really know better.) It does not finally matter how reluctant a German I am; under protest or not, it is what I will remain, till the day I die, and this not only in the ignorant eyes of the world, but with a certain justice, because, whether I like it or not, that Pale Mother Germania birthed me and imprinted me with enough synaptic connections that their mark on me will keep fading with time, perhaps, but never go away. Let me only glance in the mirror, or let others imagine me in one of the familiar uniforms, and the ineradicable truth stares me in the face.

     Born a German, die a German is not, cannot be the whole story—those who see some kind of essential self in such tribal identities are wrong. I am altogether with Saul Bellow (as I have made clear before, in the epigraph to #85) in that I too “recognized at an early age that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my origins and surroundings were to be allowed to determine the course of my life.” Like he, “I did not intend to be wholly dependent on history and culture: full dependency must mean that I was done for.”* Nonetheless, there are ties that will loosen but not let us go, struggle as we may against them, and no matter how exasperated and despondent they make us feel. Portnoy, after his outburst, remained as Jewish as before. And I know that feeling only too well.

     As I’ve been pondering, over the years, how the train wreck (yes, those tracks and boxcars) that is “my” people’s twentieth-century history could have been averted, I have sometimes found myself engaging in various what ifs: what if Alsace-Lorraine had not been annexed in 1871 or the First World War had been averted some other way (it could have been); or what if the peace had not been botched and the Weimar Republic had survived (which it could have done with a little more luck)? What if Germany had ended up with a Franco, not a Hitler, or if the phantom from Braunau had met with more effective opposition earlier, from within or without? (The German generals were on the edge of revolt over Hitler’s gambles on the way to Munich, because they felt utterly unprepared for a major war; had the British not yielded, thinking they had preserved peace for their day to general jubilation, there might have been a coup.) Or what if, in July 1944, the plot against Hitler had succeeded like the one staged against Mussolini a year earlier (again, it was a close call)? The successor regime would hardly have passed for a model democracy, but the camps would have been closed on German orders, and something might have been saved of German honor; defeat would have been equally certain and deserved, but the results would have been quite different. (The story is told, embellished but correct in outline, in Valkyrie with Tom Cruise.)

     At this point, on the thousandth bout with such dark musings, something unexpected caught my eye: if it had been so, there would have been no occupation of Berlin, no German-American school, indeed no me at all, given how the mesh of causal chains, in its near-infinite complexity and total interconnection, would have been set in a different direction. In other words, no matter how unacceptable German history may look to me, the extremely narrow set of circumstances that allowed me and everyone else alive right now to be born and exist as we do, probably requires that nothing in the past could have gone any differently from how it did—because the causal lines leading to the constellation that produces all of us is so unimaginably thin that even the tiniest difference in circumstance would have led to a different outcome, not the current one with us in it as we are. And if that is true, then doesn’t it follow that there could be no better history for any of us to be part of as we are, whether at the level of families or nations or even the world at large? Consequently, to the extent that I value my existence as I am in the present, must I not accept (or even will, as Nietzsche would put it) the entirety of history that produced me, since no alternate course of events would have led to this point that includes me as I am? And thus I arrive at the astounding conclusion that wishing for a better past does not actually make sense unless you want to wish your current self out of existence! The thought boggles my mind, and I wonder whether it might prove significant and lasting enough to be consoling and therapeutic. We shall see.

*From his foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.