Read Online Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis - Free Book Online

gas masks. “Two for one,” I suggested. “You get the ability to live up to your moral responsibility and one newly minted Jew.”
    Israel refused. Khalil continued to goad me. I finally determined that it would only be just if I took one year’s interest from the reparations fund of which I was trustee and with it purchased the East German gas masks for Palestinian use. I had no inkling when I did so that Khalil was playing a double game with me: even while he was urging me to act, he was informing a Berlin reporter of my every action. “For arms, asylum, that is the deal,” “a million gas masks,” “millions of marks.” And so on. He hoped, in effect, to involve me, and Israel, and Israeli-German relations, in a dreadful scandal. He hoped to ruin me, or at the very least he didn’t care if he did, if in the bargain he could harm Israel.
    You may perhaps see the outlines of a morality tale here, or perhaps a tragic hero’s fall. But I warned you at the outset that this was a story about myself. Perhaps, for greater warning, I should have put the word “story” in italics. The reason being that certain all-important portions of this story I’ve told – comforting received wisdom though they had become to many – are just that: a story. I am referring to my so-called “war record,” my actions in an underground Jewish resistance in Berlin during the war, my heroic, or whatever you would say, murder of an SS officer. Lies. All lies. Or if you will, perhaps, the only genuinely literary act of Franz Rosen’s career. I spent the war in cowering terror in a coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg, afraid in nearly equal parts of being exposed and being bombed. The only sex I had was with a haberdasher who owned the building. He was a Nazi for sure, but the only secret information he held was his sexuality. I suppose that my “underground” fantasy started with nothing more than the basement I found myself in. I could go no lower in life than I found myself, but I could fly on wings of imagination. Is it possible for a lie to begin in metaphor? I imagined the underground of which I would be a gallant queer part, I imagined each of my Nazi lovers and the secrets they would divulge, I imagined how I would kill when I had to. These were even fantasies that I elaborated in acts of love with the haberdasher, who excited my pity and contempt. And of course in the war’s aftermath there were those with complementary desires, those who wished to believe in Jews in underground activities here – so it was a convenient lie as well. No one, finally, had the heart to check it out too carefully. I wish I could say that the war had made me a killer. But it had made me a liar.
    And it had done one thing more: it had exposed to my unavoidable stare my sexuality. Previous to the war I had had sexual liaisons, but with women, prostitutes chiefly, apparently in order to prove to myself my masculinity, to overcome a terror of the vagina which at the time I took to be ordinary and inevitable. My first inklings that things might be otherwise came in my affection for my brother’s friends, who were hearty, athletic types, exemplars, really, despite being Jewish, of the estheticized, sexualized public sphere which the Nazis created, in which bodies and athleticism were worshipped. But these secret affections led me nowhere. It took the coal bin in Prenzlauer Berg to make things clear to me. My haberdasher was a brute, but astute enough, in his sexual instincts if little else. He spoke to me often about the mistreatment of the Jews being taken too far, as if to remind me how lucky I was and to persuade me of his compassion on which I depended. That compassion, however, he extended only to certain sorts of Jews, the artistic, the philosophers, the heirs to Heine as it were, not to the stock exchange Jews whom he blamed for the troubles of all of us; these feelings