BEING JEWISH

from The Invalidity of All Guarantees

Bertolt Brecht:
You, being Jewish, should be more catholic than me in finding a place to rest your head. You carry cultures more lightly and with deeper pockets. Us biedermeier soul-scraping narrow-minded self-sufficient gute Germans wear the Kultur on our chain-mail sleeves and it weighs a Teuton. It’s a struggle to move our iron bottoms. We even dance sitting down. The Kampf in Mein Kampf should be ‘camp’, in the French sense of playacting.  We act all the time to avoid showing our face. I’m a barrel organ, a market barker, a circus ringmaster, a glockenspiel hunting horn. I repeat myself constantly, the same old tune.
 
Unlike your Jew’s harp. It’s for improvisation. Moreover, you don’t like to sit down, move on and around, never quite settling. You dress yourself in unobtrusive colours that blend into a brown and grey background, and are innately patient as a result of a history of having to suffer silently. I suppose I’m speaking of Marronism. Integrating yourself without losing your identity, amongst your own.
 
Walter Benjamin:
You mean Marranism. Making Jewish cosmopolitanism an -ism, which you mispronounce to sound like an old chestnut, a purring ronron rather than a ran ran for your dear life, is just another way of getting at it.
 
BB:
I’m thinking of Max Jacob. He so wants to appear an early Christian that he hangs around the lions’ cage at Paris Zoo, hoping to be thrown in. 
 
WB:
Poor Max. It isn’t just the lions that know his game.  
 
BB:
But I take your point. Christ Crucified was a Jew, and a man of the world. Still I envy you people for your cultural lability, intellectual limpidity, social adaptability...
 
WB:
Rich that, coming from you who has the perfect mechanism in place to survive anything and anywhere. You contradict yourself as often as you change your mind.
 
BB:
I see it as strength.
 
WB:
And so do others. As to the advantages of being ‘You people’, ergo Jewish, I don’t go around being a Proud Jew like Gershom Scholem. But I can see the insidious in stereotyping. As far as I’m concerned there is no tribe. Like Montaigne’s plain and simple ur-settlement, ‘The Jews’ are everywhere and nowhere. Peoples scattered into individuals, no different from anyone else. 
 
‘The Jews’ as a tribe is only a label, for political purposes. Used by Nazis and Zionists. The replantation to Palestine is as artificial as the stigmatisation by the SS. Stimulated by fear and hate, respectively. I understand the fear, and suffer the hate and try not to take it personally. It’s not me. It’s my stereotype, which I would condemn if life was a novel or play. I would gladly swap the label for being a hermit in the desert or a prisoner in solitary confinement. I don’t belong to anybody, or anywhere except my writing room. Still I’m branded with the Star of David. With exile, at least you can exclude yourself.
 
BB:
Helli did it in Berlin. At the height of her popularity she officially resigned from the Jewish Community. 
 
WB:
I just resigned myself, nothing official…
 
BB:
It wasn’t just her Art, of course, with Helli. The Jewish Community was too bourgeois to be compatible with her Communism. If Helene Weigel wasn’t yet a target for the Nazis, it put her in the front line. Commie Jew. I love my Helli. She has a genius for putting the cat amongst the pigeons. And she also invented the Silent Scream for my Epic Theatre, saying it was a borrowing from the Yiddish Theatre where it was used for comic effect.
 
But I’d hate to have to agree with Scholem. You should be proud of being Jewish. The truth be told, your people produce the best chopped chicken liver in the world. None better, you told me yourself.
 
WB:
No. It was my grandmother’s gefilte fish.
 
BB:
But I understand that’s the bottom of the barrel. That must mean something.
 
WB:
Fear of poverty.
 
BB:
I still prefer the chopped liver. Meat is more human than fish. Unseriously though, you’re what Theodor Herzl had in mind for transplanting European culture elsewhere. That fragment from your Berlin chronicle you wrote in Ibiza last year when nobody was looking is, I think, Jewish writing like no other. It’s the literary equivalent of Helli’s Silent Scream.
 
WB:
You mean ‘The Cellar’ in One-Way Street.
 
BB:
‘We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations. What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations, what horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below, where the deepest shafts are reserved for what is most commonplace.’ 
 
WB:
The home of the Wandering Jew is everywhere and, like you say, nowhere. He has domesticated exile.
 
BB:
It augurs well for what seems likely to be a long one for you. My exile is less promising. It only really works in Germany. America for me is a suburb off the autobahn. Yours is an open book. My Wyoming is Bavaria, a harvest floating in a cesspool. Yours is an interim stop. My Chicago is Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Yours is just another place to lay your head. And Hollywood? Mine is a fleapit in Augsburg where I dreamed as a boy. Yours embraces the future with Rudolf Arnheim’s end of The Book. 
 
‘Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films… all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religions… await their exposed resurrections, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.’
 
Strange. I thought you, who love books more than anyone I know, would be able to envisage a future without them. Film liquidating indigenous cultures. Imagine disappearing all German Art as we know it, including the folky family furniture of the Homeland that Hitler is dusting up and polishing to preserve the master race’s biedermeier soul. But no doubt as a good Marxist you are not afraid of destroying to build. In this case to get out into the world and mix with the future. Get up and go. 
 
WB: 
Bertolt, don’t make me laugh. All I want to do is to sit quietly in my room. At home with myself, my books and bibelots, and as little outside stimulation as possible.