A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [211]
Before unification, however, Moishe had still considered returning to Israel. There was no opportunity to make money in real estate there, but he thought he might be able to get something going in import-export. He had made some contacts with Russia. Then Russia had collapsed, and the German real estate market exploded. At the same time things were getting very difficult in Israel. His friends in Israel and his brother Ruwen were growing increasingly frustrated with the right-wing Israeli government, and when Moishe talked of returning to Israel, they discouraged him.
The woman he lived with was born in Israel, but when she was three years old, her parents had returned to Germany to study and never left. Neither she nor Moishe was committed to living in Germany, but that was nevertheless where they lived. And since he lived there, he wanted to be active in the Jewish Community because that was how he had always lived. “As long as I am here, I think that I have to be active in Jewish life and try to do something for the Jewish community/’ he said. To him, part of that was a concern for the few Jews from the former East Germany. But he was almost alone in that view. Ron Zuriel visited the Jewish Community in the East “once or twice” when they were divided. Among Westerners, ironically, there was less interest in the East once it opened. Irene Runge complained that she knew people in West Berlin who always kept in contact with her until the Wall came down. After that, she never heard from them.
“I KNEW THEM from the thirties, and I can't believe they're back,” said Mia Lehmann. Skinheads and neo-Nazis marched through Prenzlauer Berg with their white-laced boots, swastikas, and slogans of hate against Turks and Jews and foreigners. Mia, who had not participated in a Jewish organization since the German Communists in Belgium had side-tracked her plans to move to Palestine almost sixty years earlier, now became a regular participant at the Kulturverein. She had not found religion or forgotten how the synagogue in the Bucovina had closed its doors and made her mother cry. Mia probably never forgot anything. It was just that she thought she should be around Jews, that Jews should stick together, because Nazis seemed to be coming back.
It is widely believed that the fall of the GDR and the unification of Germany brought neo-Nazism to the East. According to the Western version, the GDR was too repressive for neo-Nazis to function, and now, because there was freedom of expression, neo-Nazis appeared. In the Eastern version, neo-Nazism was imported to Eastern Germany from the West.
Neither version is completely true. Neo-Nazism may have had a twenty-year headstart in the West, but by the 1980s, and probably earlier, there were neo-Nazi activities in the East. In 1987 neo-Nazis broke up a concert in Prenzlauer Berg shouting anti-Semitic slogans and “Sieg heil” This was known because for the first time the GDR media were allowed to report on the neo-Nazis’ trial, at which the light sentences belied the legend of GDR severity toward Nazis. Neo-Nazi graffiti was seen on walls, carefully analyzed by the Stasi, and then painted over. Numerous neo-Nazis were brought to trial and imprisoned. The West German government had a practice of paying the GDR for East German “political prisoners.” Curiously, a number of the prisoners they chose to rescue—for substantial fees —were neo-Nazis, who went on to become active in West German neo-Nazi groups. By the time of unification, the extreme right organization had become fairly sophisticated,