Die Falle
In spring 1959, I lived in Heidelberg, preparing to teach courses for the University of Maryland’s Overseas Division, which had its main office in that city. I had the good luck to fall in with a number of advanced Heidelberg students who were planning a performance at a new institution, a bar and cabaret, Die Falle. Because I could speak German with an American accent without difficulty, I was enlisted to play the role of Claude Eatherly, the deranged American pilot, in a skit staged in a madhouse.
The performance began. As it happened, my counterpart, the stage psychiatrist, fed me the penultimate line of the skit soon after the outset, and I did not have enough stage aplomb—or German—to transform the line into something more pertinent to the conversation, so the skit ended almost where it began, to general consternation.
The next evening, I came into Die Falle and passed three somewhat older men at the bar: Wolfgang Iser, whom I came to know well and respect; the recently deceased Peter Wapnewski, who, some years earlier, had been a member of the Nazi Party; and another professor, Hans Klein. At that time, Messrs. Iser and Wapnewski were instructors of German at the University and Dr. Klein was a professor of forensic medicine. One or the other greeted me with the comment, “Ach, hier kommt der kleine Kriegsverbrecher!” I was appalled and said something crossly, etwa, “Look who’s talking!” Or: “With what right have you to call others ‘Kriegsverbrecher’?” “Oh, Oh,” they sighed, in mock distress, and then began listing American atrocities, not difficult to do. My response, meaning to convey the idea that there are important differences of degree in such matters and my being unable to say, in German, “differences of degree,” was to say, literally, that in such matters it was necessary to introduce a certain “moralische Gelenkigkeit,” which phrase produced their derisive laughter.
That was the end of the matter for several years, but there were to be two repercussions, one concerning Dr. Klein (the ostensibly liberal socialist University humanist, now dead) and one concerning Professor Wapnewski.
In the case of Klein, it was the revelation that he had contributed to a monstrous war crime. The following web site contains an account of the unspeakable torture and murder of Jewish children by a group of doctors, among whom this very Klein played a role. You may not want to read the following: www.midstreamthf.com/200204/feature.html. [Editor’s note: This link no longer works, but S.C. provided another one that tells the awful truth https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Terrorists+in+Hamburg+redux.+(The+Shoah)-a086743022. [1]]
Wapnewski is said to have been disliked throughout his career, though, aside from his youthful peccadillo, mainly decent; but I did not forget his mockery. A meeting of the IVG was held at Princeton in the late summer of 1970. I assisted. A bus was to take these scholars to the Cloisters, a museum for medieval art in New York. I stood at the entrance to the bus, probably counting heads. But who should come running, panting, lurching across campus in the direction of the bus? This very Wapnewski. He came up to the door. I looked at him. “Ach, Professor Wapnewski,” said I. “I remember you from Heidelberg. Do you remember me, from Die Falle, ‘der kleine Kriegsverbrecher’?” He looked astonished. “Well, Mein Herr, go to the back of the bus,” and I pushed him up the stepwell into the bus.
Commentary
The phrase in boldface alludes, intellectually-historically speaking, to the sanctions placed on black persons in the Southern United States until the putative end of segregation in 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. So from this moment on, officially speaking, the back of the bus has lost all suggestion of tarring its inhabitants with the brush of obloquy. As a phrase, it can now have an only allusive meaning–a meaning it once had in referring to the insults of bigoted, vindictive authorities to persons they considered inferior. If I was then appealing to this unkind meaning, then wouldn’t the insult I meant to level at Wapnewski redound to my own discredit, for if, in this scenario, he was the disgraced Negro, wasn’t I then the “racist white pig”? That would be the entirely legitimate view of an American observer, unaware of the special meanings of this case. The time of the event, however, was a German time, so to speak; it was taking place within the duration of the Internationale Vereinigung für germanische Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft. If we understand the scene as an innerdeutsche Angelegenheit, then, in Germany’s past, it wasn’t the Negro who was ordered to the back of the bus by a Southern racist; it was the Jew who, if fortunate, was merely ordered to the back of the bus by a Nazi racist. The Heidelberg clique, including, especially, Wapnewski and Klein, were implicated in this scene. It was the best I could do, as a Jew, to bring one of them into a consciousness of his involvement, especially in the light of the particular ignobility of some or much of the Heidelberg Professoriate, as see: Steven P. Remy’s The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University. The plain sense of this book title is that Heidelberg University was Nazified but not de-Nazified after the War, as my own experience at Die Falle had shown me.
Editor’s Note
1 The author’s interjection in his email with the new link (see above) seemed worth passing on to readers:
“Hans Klein was not pursued. He became an instructor of forensic medicine at the University of Heidelberg.” [comment: “instructor”? you mean sumptuously-paid Professor, with brand-new left-wing credentials].
and I was exchanging barbs with this swine!
xxx
“Da geht er!”
I was spending part of my sabbatical year in Heidelberg, in the pleasant, book-laden apartment of Professor Glenn Most in the Unterer Fauler Pelz, immediately adjacent to the city jail. Except for the shouts of the prisoners nearby and their girlfriends on weekends, the rooms in this top-floor eyrie were perfect for study, and I began to think (to my mind) sublime thoughts about Hölderlin’s Empedokles.
The days were sunny, and I was accustomed to jog in the afternoon, heading down through the city across the Alte Brücke and up into the Hölderlinweg. The ritual ran its peaceful course until the one afternoon when, jogging down the Kettengasse, I heard a voice cry out, “Da geht er, der Jude!” I whirled around and saw a tall, dark figure hauling a crate of empty bottles out of the entrance of a bar: he struck me as an “Arab” with an axe to grind.
I continued jogging, distracted by the incident, no longer thinking about Empedokles but about what could have led this person to shout these words at me. He could not have concluded from his brief look at my face (if indeed he had ever looked at my face) that I was Jewish. Was it because my jogging clothes were light blue and white? Did my colors put him in mind of the Israeli flag and the people it flew over?
The next day I set out jogging—and was immediately faced with a dilemma. Should I take the same path I’d taken the day before and risk the same jeering and possibly, following that, an angry, physical confrontation? No, I was not going to let myself be intimidated. I would go the way I was used to going, the way I preferred to go.
..
Having got to the top of the street without incident, I was on the point of congratulating myself on my fearless decision, when, to my consternation, I heard that voice again and turned and saw the same figure carrying his bottles: “Da ist er wieder, der Jude!”
I was upset. I jogged for a while and then came down from the hill. That evening I phoned to the Jüdische Kultusgemeinde in Heidelberg and told them what had happened and how I felt threatened. Their response was one that many others in comparable situations have heard: “We cannot do anything until you’ve been physically harmed.” Krankenhausreif, I suppose.
I went out the next day, unsure how to proceed. These incidents were interfering with my freedom to think about what I wanted to think about. And then I saw two policemen at the top of the street.
I told them my story, and one said in the local accent that I wasn’t sure I’d understood: “He could say that and in your case hit the mark.” I asked the police to come with me to the bar where my molester worked. They declined to do so. I couldn’t make any sense of our encounter but jogged a different route for my peace of mind.
The next day was the day when my new cleaning help arrived; in this case it was a student whom I hadn’t previously seen, and he turned out to be a powerful Australian fellow and—selig wer glaubt!—partly Jewish. We agreed we would take care of this matter directly.
We went to the bar. We came into its dark interior. I felt like a character from a James Bond novel. My large, muscular friend sat beside me, obviously preferring the adventure to vacuuming my carpets. We ordered two whiskeys, and then I casually said to the woman who served us, “Do you have someone working here of Arab descent?’ She thought. “You mean Herr S-and-so?” and she cited a Middle Eastern name: “He’s originally from Lebanon.” I said I would like to speak to him. She said he wasn’t at hand. “A big fellow?” I said. “You mean Mr. S-and-so? No, he’s the owner. He’s short.” “He’s in his 20s or 30s?” “No, he’s an elderly man.” “Do you have another Middle Eastern person working here?” “Not that I know,” she said.
And so our visit ended without consequence. The matter stayed that way, and I avoided further confrontation and left Heidelberg soon after.
A year later I had the pleasure of lunch with Professor Dieter Borchmeyer, a friend of my friend Professor Walter Hinderer. Our conversation was amiable, we chatted about a great many topics; and then since our restaurant was very close to the Kettengasse, I was reminded of the incident and told him my story,
He jumped up. He was strongly affected by what I told him. He knew the bar; he knew patrons there, especially a local newspaperman, a writer. He said, “We’ll go there immediately and get to the bottom of this thing.” I was glad of the idea.
We went. The bar, just at the end of lunchtime, was full. And Dieter Borchmeyer found his man. He told him the story. His confidant knew exactly what was at stake. The person who had shouted at me was a casual worker, well known in the city as one who helped out at various places of business. He was South African, the son of a white father and a black mother, and he was emotionally disturbed. The case that Dieter Borchmeyer reported to him was not new at all. The fellow had discovered that he only had to cry out, especially in crowded places, as in buses and on trains, “Da ist er—der Jude!” to produce confusion, angry expostulations, indignation at his mischief. Dieter turned to me. “So there is your explanation.” Aha, the policeman’s surmise had come back to me in memory. He had not used the conditional, “er könnte sagen . . . .” He had said, “Er sagt es . . . to everyone; and in your case it hit the mark.”
Commentary
I offer this account as an instance of the crazy-shrewd manipulations and the untoward consequences of Germany’s admirable law against Volksverhetzung.