Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Heil Trump
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
As a teenager eavesdropping on adult conversations, I tuned out when I overhead someone heatedly discuss the moral, ethical, practical and--for the Holocaust generation—poignant question: If you had had the chance, would you have killed Hitler? In Berlin, I’m asking and re-asking this question. I’m scraping my conscience with it.
I came to Berlin to escape America. To forget, if only for a short time, the demagogues shredding Democracy. To purge the mean-spirited, demonic mob promoting white nationalism. To blot out the despicables who hate others more than they love their country.
Berlin—a graveyard of remembrance—is having none of that. The city is strong-arming the golden rule, shoving it into my throat, gagging me.
I’m named Noah. It’s a marquee name meaning Evil Causes Worldwide Flood, Jewish Boat-Builder Saves All.
Unlike my namesake, I’m neither a ship captain nor a zoologist. I teach high school history and civics.
Every day, I’m telling my students that the dark side of American history is regurgitating itself. What I don’t tell them is that, with American fascism nearing flood stage, I have a recurring fantasy about building an ark and sailing far away.
In Berlin, vexed by my inability to leave myself at home, I’m sleeping worse than a WWII German soldier under bombardment. I should never have come here.
Neue Wache memorializes the victims of every war, every tyranny. Inside the tomb, buried together, are the remains of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim. “We honor the memory of the peoples who suffered in war…”
The domed structure has an open skylight focusing a single ray of light onto Mother with Dead Son by Käthe Kollwitz. A sacred space. The stillness of the air prays for peace.
A stooped, bent man with a full beard and a nursing young mother—the past and the future—stare silently at the statue. I am cloaked by the solitude of my sorrow. Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise plays in my head.
I don’t like Neue Wache. I don’t have large enough tears.
The Berlin Jewish Museum building zigzags like a deconstructed, tortured Star of David. Inside, massive concrete walls collide in pained disharmony. Forbidding, traumatizing. My sense of place, of direction, is stolen. Museum claustrophobia crawls into my armpits.
Jewish family life during twelve years of Nazi rule is revealed in 9,500 works of art, 7,000 everyday objects, 24,000 photographs, 11,000 books. The galleries have angled floors, canted beams, narrow windows. Disjointed halls lead to empty spaces which lead to dead ends. Emphasis on dead.
Near the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe crouches close to the ground, as if ashamed. The maze of undulating, dark grey concrete blocks are tombstones. My body shivers as if my heart is being frozen inside a block of ice, then shattered.
Trump’s Hitler-like superpower is his talent for bringing out the worst in me. In the way a child learns racial animus by mimicry, from watching Trump turn voters into stormtroopers I’ve come to hate him and the Republican mini-fuhrers who follow him.
If past is prologue, Berlin is a screaming prophecy.
Heil Trump.
