"Atatürk! Yes! A friend sent it to me, and..."

Interview with Cilly Kugelman

Cilly Kugelman is the Program Director of the Jewish Museum.

Daniel Miller: How did you come to your position at the Museum?

Cilly Kugelman: I was in a very different field – in psychiatry. But I became interested in my private time in the post-war history of Jews in Germany. I didn't really want to deal with the history of the holocaust. I was more interested in the history of survival. So I started working on this topic and I wrote some essays. And when the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt was established they asked me to participate in the post-war part of the exhibition ...

DM: They asked you to participate as a curator?

CK: Yes. My expertise was in the period of displaced persons, Jewish refugees and displaced persons camps, and the encounter between German Jews, Eastern European Jews and the German and Allied authorities mainly in the American Zone of Occupation. The German population at that time regarded Jews as aliens, and didn't know how to confront them. They hesitated to use the term ‘‘Jew’’ not being sure whether it was politically correct or not. The period in question embraced the time from the end of the war until the State of Israel was declared in 1948 and the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949, when most of the displaced persons had left Germany.

DM: How would you define the current period?

CK: We are now in the middle of big changes. The generation of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators is dying and new generations have assumed... responsibilities. The breakdown of the Soviet Union 1990 provoked an influx of former Soviet Union Jews, who came to Germany on a Jewish ticket, with a completely different view on Judaism. During the past 60 years German society also changed; there is now a growing desire to not be reduced to descendants of perpetrators. During sports events and other big public events, people decorate their cars, balconies and themselves with the national flags and similar items. In our last exhibition “Heimatkunde” we interpreted this behavior as a kind of branding, similar to Coca Cola.

DM: Do you think Germany is becoming more nationalistic?

CK: A recent report on Anti-Semitism in Germany stated that 20% of the German population has anti-Jewish resentments, slightly more than western countries like Italy, the Netherlands or France and less than Poland, Hungary or Portugal. To me, that is nothing to worry about it. In every society, about 20% of people will be racists and xenophobes. In fact, I would be surprised if it wasn't the case, because we are confronted with serious political and economical problems...

DM: How do you see these problems?

CK: Germany now is confronting the fact that it is not a homogenous society. Citizenship and belonging build on the idea of jus sanguinis, the right to nationality based on parentage, is no longer valid. Germany today has more than four million Muslim inhabitants, mainly from Turkey. It is now very obvious that these immigrants will stay and won’t leave, and return “home” as many initially thought after the first influx of foreign workers in the late 1950es. People are beginning to realize that Islam has become a part of Germany, although historically it isn't anchored here. In the big cities, there's a growing openness for coexistence. On the other hand, cities are confronted with schools that have to deal with a majority of students who don't speak German, and this causes many problems.

DM: Last time we met you compared the situation of the German Muslim population in Germany to the situation of the Jewish population in the nineteenth century.

CK: One of the key comparable experiences is the conflict between traditionalism and the challenges of an modern society that contradicts habitual attitudes, customary family values and religious laws. The example 19th century Judaism provides an interesting case study...

DM: I notice you have a picture of Atatürk on your bookshelf.

CK: Atatürk! Yes! A friend sent it to me, and... I think he's an interesting politician. Who certainly applied a quite brutal system to transform the traditional Ottoman society and bring it into the 20th century. But with the recent rise of religious fundamentalism, he stands out as a secular voice, and which this I can identify.

Alice Buschmeier: Do you think that Judaism could be an alternative to nationalistic ideas?

CK: Absolutely not... Judaism has an ethnic and a religious component, a particularistic, tribal side and a universalistic perspective. Throughout history, sometimes one was stronger, and sometimes the other. But in the moment Israel became the national state of Jews, the universalistic component almost vanished. This actually belong to the tradition of Diaspora.

DM: Do you think that Zionism was a Messianic project?

CK: There were Messianic dimensions in Zionism. But what is left of this Messianism apart from the national anthem called Hatikvah? The state exists; it is confronted with apparently unsolvable problems... Messianism in Israel seems to me to have vanished. Unless you would count the nationalistic settlers who act on these grounds.

DM: What do you mean by the idea of diaspora?

CK: If you type the word ''Diaspora'' into Google, you get a lot of sites from Africa. Almost nobody relates the term to Judaism today, when for me, it is very strongly related to Judaism.

DM: What does diaspora mean to you?

CK: It means to somehow be uprooted, having left an ancestral home to live among strangers. To me a seat between the two apocryphal chairs is the most convenient place, a perfect location to observe one's environment.

DM: Does the Jewish Museum seek to strengthen diaspora consciousness?

CK: Jewish history in Germany, the topic of our museum, deals with a diaspora identity that was very creative and rich in many areas of life. This strong and impressive European Jewish Diaspora came to an end with the Second World War. The numbers of Jews in France and Britain are diminishing, and though the German Jewish community grew in the past 20 years, this growth has also now come to an end. There's no real intellectual, artistic or economic power left anymore. The European Jewry which exists today is basically the remainder of a former bright and radiant Diaspora. The two centers of Jewish life are now Israel and the United States...

DM: There is now a Palestinian diaspora...

CK: You can see modern Palestinian identity as a repetition of the Zionist dream, fighting for a national home in the Middle East. The foundation of Israel turned Muslim and Christian Arabs living between Lebanon, Syria and Jordan into an uprooted people, defined as Palestinians, a collective nation who longs to get back to its ancestral territories. They don’t have the long tradition of “uprootedness” that Jews can look back on.

DM: How do you see this tradition?

CK: In our museum work, we try to look at “uprootedness” as something definitely positive. We are at the moment in the process of creating a diaspora garden. The initial idea by the architect was to create a Biblical garden, but our experts from the Botanical garden crashed that dream because of the wrong climate conditions for Middle East plants in Germany. We then turned the idea of a Biblical Garden to a Garden of Diaspora, looking at plants that are used for Jewish holiday rituals in Germany, fruits that substitute biblical offerings and even plants that were given anti-Semitic names like tradescantia fluminensis, called “Wandering Jew” because it quickly covers the ground.

DM: Do you believe that returning 3.3m Jews to Europe is a plausible or desirable project?

CK: Oh no...

DM: It cannot be done...

CK: People act because they wish to act, or because they have to act. If they feel at home and at peace, why should they move... well... why would an American Jew leave the United States? What for? He can make a living, he has a good life, he has a house, and he has friends, why should he emigrate? Some people leave their native country out of desperation, some as adventurers. Younger people go abroad for different reasons, for work or to study, most of them return home, some fall in love, marry and stay, but this type of emigration is are not a mass phenomena.

DM: What if the situation in Middle East dramatically worsened?

CK: Then it might look different.

DM: Do you think that the Europe would welcome the return of the Jews?

CK: European countries, as we know, will not welcome mass immigration.

DM: Does Europe miss the Jews?

CK: I think Jews may miss Europe, but Europe doesn't miss Jews. A minority is never missed by a majority. Human beings usually don't welcome strangers and foreigners; they never did, and probably never will. States and societies sometimes are forced to create and secure conditions that will allow for integration of migrants, but it is nothing people like to do...

This interview was conducted in Berlin on February 21, 2012 by Daniel Miller and Alice Buschmeier, and transcribed and edited by Daniel Miller.