It would be an exaggeration, however, to speak, as some Berliners did, of a “renaissance” of Jewish life in the once and future German capital. The Berlin Jewish contingent’s size, while impressive by postwar German standards, was but a shadow of the 160,000-strong community of the 1920s. As before, Berlin’s Jews were sharply divided between more established residents and new arrivals from the east. Many of the Russian-Jewish newcomers (in contrast to the Ostjuden a century earlier) were less interested in cultivating Jewish traditions than in integrating themselves as fast as possible into German society. In 1997 a much-publicized quarrel between two political factions within the local Jewish community became so embittered that Ignaz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called in a CDU politician from Frankfurt, Michel Friedman, to try to end the embarrassing “mud-fight” in Berlin. The city’s political establishment, meanwhile, did little to assist newly arrived Jewish artists in their efforts to rebuild a viable cultural scene. As Der Spiegel observed: “Apparently no local politician has gotten it into his head that the unexpected and undeserved opportunity to revive Germany’s Jewish cultural heritage requires special attention.”
Rather than promoting a living Jewish culture, Berlin cultivated a nostalgia for the lost era of pre-Nazi Jewish vitality. Oranienburger Strasse, once lined with Jewish businesses, now became a kind of Jewish theme park. In addition to the New Synagogue, of which only the dome and front section—not the main sanctuary—were restored, there was an upscale kosher restaurant where tourists in search of an authentic Jewish experience could eat vegetarian blintzes and listen to piped-in klezmer music. A building nearby bore the sign, Kleiderfabrikation Goldstein, the work of a film crew making a TV movie about Jüdisches Berlin. Across the street stood a picturesquely dilapidated structure which had been turned into an avant-garde art center called Tacheles—Yiddish for “straight talking.” The building in question had opened in 1909 as one of those grand iron and glass arcades that so fascinated turn-of-the-century flaneurs. In the 1920s it had served as an exhibition hall for futurist products made by the German Electric Company. Allied bombs and East German neglect had reduced it to a sagging hulk. The artists who “occupied” the place in 1990 with the battle cry, “Ideals are ruined, so we’ll save the ruins,” drew generous subsidies from the Berlin Senate. By the mid-1990s Tacheles had become a not-so-secret “secret tip” in all the guidebooks. A restaurant on the ground floor called “Café Zapata” promised a taste of the Mexican revolution, Berliner-Szene style, to package-tour groups bussed in from all over Europe.
Although generally welcoming its new Jewish residents, Berlin witnessed a number of anti-Semitic incidents in the years following the fall of the Wall. Neo-Nazis vandalized headstones in Jewish cemeteries and painted Juden Raus! on synagogues (which eventually were placed under twenty-four-hour police guard). Skinhead thugs declared that it was intolerable that Berlin, the “capital of the German Reich,” should once again be attracting Jews from other parts of Europe. These actions were part of a much larger wave of right-wing antiforeigner violence washing over reunited Germany. In the fall of 1991 a group of skinheads, cheered on by local residents, attacked Vietnamese and Mozambican workers in a housing project in Hoyerswerda (in the former GDR). In the following summer thugs beat Gypsies and attacked the residents of an asylum center in the eastern port of Rostock. Many West Germans attributed these incidents to the postunification frustrations of the East Germans, but even worse outrages occurred in the “old states”: the firebombing of a house in Mölln, near Hamburg, that killed a Turkish woman and her niece and granddaughter; the attack on a Turkish residence in Solingen that killed five women and children from a family who had been living in West Germany for twenty-five years.
Tacheles Art Center in Oranienburger Strasse
The heart of Berlin’s neo-Nazi scene was located in the eastern district of Lichtenberg, where the SED regime had built a number of vast prisonlike housing complexes. In GDR days the area had been a bastion of Communist loyalty, but in the last years of the regime it also harbored about 300 neo-Nazis. Many of the Lichtenberg skinheads had started out as hippies or punks but, when that form of protest seemed too timid, switched to Nazi slogans and symbols. According to Ingo Hasselbach, a veteran (and later critic) of the scene, he and his friends began spraying swastikas next to their circled “A’s” for anarchism. “We didn’t think much about what a swastika meant, but we knew it was the most forbidden of all symbols.” Inspired by West German television documentaries on Nazi military campaigns in World War II, the skins ranged through the city in search of Fidschis (their term for Vietnamese guest workers) to terrorize and beat up. Admittedly, there were not very many Fidschis in East Berlin, but the boys did what they could. They also targeted the pacifist, reform-socialist crowd that congregated in Prenzlauer Berg. On the night of October 17, 1987, a gang of thugs armed with iron bars and chains stormed a pacifist rock concert at the Zionskirche. Hasselbach, who had recently served a prison term for publicly demanding that the Wall come down, was in on the attack. “We cleaned the church out,” he boasted. “We hauled the punks out and beat them up.” Revealingly, nearby police units were very slow to stop the Zionskirche bloodletting. Later, a Stasi official admitted that the GDR regime saw the skinhead gangs as a useful tool in their battle against the nascent reform movement.
When the Wall came down East Berlin’s right-wingers began getting financial and organizational support from West German neo-Nazis, who saw the Ossi thugs as potential foot soldiers in their campaign to extend their influence to the east. Michael Kühnen, the leader of the West German Action Front of National Socialists, which was dedicated to “restoring the values of the Third Reich,” helped out with cartons of Nazi literature, imperial war flags, camouflage outfits, switchblade knives, and steel-tipped Doc Marten boots, perfect for “sidewalk cracking,” or stomping on the head of an opponent who had been knocked to the pavement. Kühnen and his lieutenants educated their Ossi charges about the “Auschwitz lie,” the doctrine that the Holocaust had never happened. Kühnen elevated Hasselbach to “Führer” of the East German branch of his movement, and in early 1990 the new chief registered the National Alternative Berlin (NA Berlin) as East Germany’s first radical-right party. The Berlin group could be more openly neo-Nazi than its West German parent because the Modrow government, anxious to show a democratic spirit, imposed few controls on the welter of new parties that sprang up after the fall of the Wall. As Hasselbach noted, “You could found the German Beer Drinkers’ Union, or the National Party of German Assholes, if you wanted to.” Within a matter of months the NA Berlin was one of the strongest radical-right parties in East Germany, with about 800 members. The group soon fractured, however, when it was disclosed that Kühnen was homosexual. One of Hasselbach’s minions, a twenty-two-year-old hairdresser known as “Stinky,” led a dissident antigay faction. If Kühnen was in the vicinity, Stinky would shout, “Always keep your backs to the wall when the Führer comes!”
Kühnen encouraged the Eastern Nazis to think beyond the borders of the GDR and to join him in opposing the “Jew-controlled Bonn Republic.” As the GDR crumbled, the Ossi skins became more aggressive, engaging in constant street battles with anarchists and leftist gangs. This was a new dimension for them, and very exciting. As Hasselbach wrote: “We were cutting loose in a way that was wilder than anything we’d ever imagined. It was an incredible feeling of freedom—roaming the streets, blowing up cars, and guarding our fortress against the anarchists, even if it did distract from the political work at hand.” Of course, what was exhilarating for the skins was horrifying for the municipal authorities. Even Hasselbach admitted that the street battles were “costing Berlin the reputation it sought as a safe city, which it needed to become Europe’s new cultural and business capital.” In spring 1990 the city struck back by raiding the skins’ headquarters in Weitlingstrasse, confiscating weapons and Nazi literature, jailing Hasselbach for five weeks, and throwing the NA Berlin off the electoral ballot for the May municipal elections.