After my parents divorced in 1973, my mother took me and my two brothers to live in Israel. We were at the tail-end of a large movement of Americans who immigrated to Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, most of whom moved for religious and ideological reasons.
My mother, like many American women of the time, had grown dissatisfied with her role as a homemaker and wife, and had started to push the envelope of what was expected of her. She wasn’t exactly a hippie but she definitely caught the wave of ideas of collectivism and socialism in the late 1960s and early 70s. Intellectually, she was in harmony with the idea of group collective solutions. Both my parents were questioning and rejecting many mainstream American mores, such as capitalism and the constraints of the nuclear family. At the same time, divorce was becoming more common and less stigmatized. They tried couples therapy for a while, but it didn’t stick.
For a long time I thought of my mother as confused post-divorce, but speaking to many who knew her back then, she was in no way confused. She knew she was going to need help raising her three children; she had also heard about the socialist environment of Israel’s kibbutzim, and felt a sincere desire to “get back to her roots” of Judaism. She sought out and found the Israel Aliya Center and won sponsorship from the World Zionist Organization, which organized and helped fund our move to Israel. We spent nearly four years living on kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, which is one of Israel’s oldest and largest kibbutzim, and still exists today. Nicknamed the “Guard of the Valley”, it’s situated in northwest Israel, a 30-minute drive south of Haifa. I lived there from ages 7-11, formative years which have shaped much of who I am today.
On the kibbutz the kids lived in “children’s houses” which were divided by age group, so my two bothers and I all lived in separate places. We slept, ate, played, showered and were taught as a group in the children’s houses; our parents lived in separate apartment four-plexes and we would visit them for a few hours each night. Microphones were set up in each room in the children’s houses and parents would take turns listening in and responding to the slightest disturbance.
Every year, each children’s house would visit the Holocaust memorial, located on the kibbutz property during Yom Kippur, one of the Jewish high, holy days of atonement. We were asked to walk silently, and led into a courtyard with one building and three short walls. I remember the walls were made of large, rectangular stones, gray in color and a bit rough and oddly shaped. The ground was covered in cobblestone, though the entrance was covered with leaves from overgrown trees, just as at the start of Autumn. The initial cool breeze was the best thing about the visit, because soon the heat would rise and we would be subjected to what seemed like hours of information about how the Jews had suffered, first as slaves in Egypt and then in the Holocaust by the Germans.
We were asked to think about and deeply feel the pain, misery, and sacrifice of our people; we were asked to set aside the fun times we were having in the children’s houses and consider how many people had lost their lives so that we could be somewhere safe. We were told we needn’t worry, but that we should be grateful to be living in Israel, our promised land. We were taken on the same field trip every year at Yom Kippur, and I dreaded it. I imagine all the kids felt the same, but perhaps I experienced it differently having been born in the United States.
By 1980 I was 12 years old, and back in America, living in Ashland, Oregon. We had six acres of land and our house was next to a creek, but our home was small and I shared a tiny room with my brother. The bunk bed took up almost all the space, and I slept on the bottom; one evening as I was lying there, somewhere between waking and dreaming, I felt my body seize up and become as rigid as a plank of wood. I started to see myself being led into a crematorium and facing a row of blazing hot steel ovens, flames visible through a small window at the top of each door.
One of the doors opened and a steel bed rolled out, the hottest fire I could imagine at the oven’s belly. I climbed in, laid down, and was rolled in. The imagined screaming woke me up. I felt what seemed like a conscious sensation of being trapped and burned alive, and I could feel the finality of death through my body. It was a completely disembodying experience, and it carved a deep wound somewhere inside. Later, after some research, I realized that burning prisoners alive was exceeding rare in Nazi concentration camps. It simply wasn't efficient. I started to wonder where such visceral ideas and feelings had come from, and why I had been so scared of Germans and Germany as a child.
I vaguely remembered having heard fearful stories of German people from my mother and grandmother, though my mother also made jokes about Germans, putting on a comic fake accent. She died in 2003 and I inherited her books, among other things, including a kind of illustrated encyclopedia titled The Wonderful Story of the Jews, written by Jacob Gewirtz. It was published in 1971, not long before our move to Israel. The text refers to the German’s “unspeakable crimes” against the Jews, as well as the “unending ravages of war, persecution, and tyranny” they have faced; some of the illustrations are quite scary, showing buildings on fire and Jewish people menaced by gun-wielding Nazis. The book presents Israel as a place of refuge, the Kibbutzim as almost unique.
When my parents divorced my mother was just 25, and had three boys attached at her hip. Those who knew her then say she was idealistic, practical, and brave, not given to introspection. I can easily imagine she looked to this book for solace, as a guide to living through difficult times. But I also wonder how it influenced her, and in turn how it influenced me.
In 2008, a friend suggested I photograph Berlin. He thought the city would be a good match for my sensibilities, but I met his suggestion with trepidation and fear. I harbored many preconceived ideas about Germans and Germany, stemming from my Jewish heritage and also from growing up in Israel. I imagined Berlin as a vast, cold, unfriendly, gritty place, but at the same time, it seemed exciting and sexy somehow. Later that year I met a guy called Christian, who was visiting my Buddhist center in Portland, Oregon. He told me he lived across the street from a sister Buddhist center in Berlin, and invited me to housesit while he was travelling.
I decided to see Berlin for myself, keen to challenge my existing ideas and also uncover reminders of the Jewish people who had lived there, until they fled or were hunted down and killed by the Nazis. I didn’t do a lot of research ahead of my arrival, I just bought a couple of travel books, a bunch of black and white film and booked a flight for when fitted around Christian. I arrived at Tegel Airport in the early morning in 2009, and Christian picked me up and drove like a wild man to his home in the Mitte district. I met his friends and roommates Brian, Suzanne, Massimo, Tanya, and Sven, and their friends Michael, Liza, Sarah, Aaron, Ulrike and Lena. I photographed them all during what came to be many stays in the city. I didn’t know I would spend the next five years reconciling my feelings and associations with Germany and the German people and writing a new narrative.
I wandered the streets making work, attempting to walk through my own looking glass towards the now. This book is an attempt to remember, confront, and unwind my attitudes about Germans, Germany, Berlin, and my Jewish inheritance; these images are part discovery, part remembrance, and part fantasy. They’re my attempt to stand where Jewish people were rounded up and deported, to remember but also reassess. They’re an effort to confront my internal attitudes and prejudices, to look into people’s eyes and find a continuation of kindness, to be open to the happiness of contemporary life in Berlin.
I followed the thread of the Holocaust because somehow it’s still in me, though I was born in 1967 in Tuczon, Arizona. I feel it inside, buried under the layers of my family’s fears and my childhood experiences. I imagine it’s in my kids too. Knowing that I’m a link in a chain of survivors comes with weight I can’t take lightly or cast aside.
When we returned to the States, my mother insisted we receive a Jewish education and prepare for Bar Mitzvahs, which I did at the customary age of 13. I attended Saturday school, where I think I was expected to intuitively apply Old Testament stories to my own personal and spiritual life. This simply never happened. I think I was too young.
Around the time of my Bar Mitzvah though, my family connected with a reform Jewish temple in our hometown in Oregon. There, I connected with what I felt to be Jewishness in the form of tradition, remembrance and honor of ancestors, openness, interconnectedness, wonder and joy, usually with the help of an acoustic guitar-led singalong. I understood the temple’s emphasis on kindness, togetherness, love and helpfulness to one another, and appreciation for intellect and creativity. Walking the streets of Berlin put me back in touch with my Jewishness, because of the history there. I felt physically and spiritually aware of my Jewish background with every step, and I wonder if my approach to this very book has been shaped by those traditions I was taught, of intellect, of creativity, and of fellow-feeling.
In Berlin I worked alone, imagining all who had walked where I was walking, those who had taken the same route as me, going to the same places. I wondered what they looked like and what was on their minds, what they were wearing, who they were with, and how long they lived. Berlin is full of ghosts. Whenever I had the freedom to wander, I took it as a gift of prolonged, uninterrupted time for reflection. For the most part no one bothered me. I felt invisible, as if I were floating above the city, swooping down occasionally to timidly snap a photo or two.
Once in a while, I found the courage to ask someone if I could photograph them. My approach was direct. I made one or two shots of each person, noted their name, thanked them, and kept going. My only direction was that they should look into the camera, and I always apologized for not knowing German. I found that most young people spoke to me in English anyway, and encountered very few who refused my camera. In between photographing places of pain, I would visit my friends and make intimate photographs of them, usually in repose. It was a strange mix of death and life, pain and pleasure; life, death, and giving life again. There was a sense of youth, freedom and joy I felt in Berlin and found a way to do that with casual, affectionate pictures of my new friends.
The photographs are organized geographically from West to East, a metaphorical walk in the direction of the rising sun but also into my own past. This book is not a document, it is a dream within a dream within another dream. Berlin is immense, there was no way I could cast a wide enough net to what it’s like; instead I have painted a picture of then and now, pain and pleasure, some people who died long ago, those who are living and young, all from my own perspective. The photographs in the back of the book are a kind of tone poem; U-Bahn station ruin, Goodbye Berlin, Goodbye Liza, Goodbye Brian, A dog jumps in the woods, I am listening and rising, Union and rising again.
Jason Langer, 2021