Back to the Roots, part 3

Gert Krell

We then left the center of the city to the south, in order to visit Bessungen, the district where my grandparent and my parents had lived during the war and where I was born. We first went to see the Viktoria School, my mother’s former grammar school which still exists – much larger today and co-educational. It has a small memorial from 1997 commemorating four Jewish girls who were murdered under the Nazis. I found the pyramid by chance, after we had walked around the whole building and also searched the large schoolyard in vain. (The school itself was closed because of the fall vacations.) It is on the front side, partly hidden by brushes and little trees.

Viktoria School Pyramid

The inscriptions say: Four Names for Many – Liese Juda, Erika Dahlerbruch, Anneliese Trier, Irmgard Schaefer; and on the other side: Against Oblivion and Indifference. I thought I had heard the name Irmgard Schäfer from my mother before, but it is a very common (and very “German”) name. When I asked her, she told me she had not known her or her name. She had had two Jewish classmates who both survived, because their families emigrated in time.

A Solid Castle

Our next stop was at Paulusplatz (Paulus Square), which is in repair. It has a Protestant Church on one side, almost literally like in Luther’s famous hymn “A Solid Castle Is Our God”, and a huge administrative building on the opposite. In the middle of the large meadow in between stand two steles, representing Christianity and Judaism. They were made by the Israeli sculptor Igael Tumarkin in 1990/1992.

The Pillars at Paulusplatz

The inscription on a separate plate says: The two steles represent Isaak’s sacrifice and Jesus’ crucification, thus expressing the fundamental experience in the Jewish as well as the Christian faith of their fright before the living God. I did not like the text when I first saw it, and I like it even less now that I have read Carlo Strenger’s new book on Israel. (Strenger, who grew up in Switzerland, is a psychology professor and a writer; he lives in Tel Aviv.) It is a wonderful “introduction into a difficult country” (his own words), empathetic yet also critical and skeptical. He thinks that one of the major causes of conflict in the Middle East is the absolute obedience to God (or rather the respective Gods) in the three major monotheistic religions, making man even sacrifice his loved-ones or himself. Christian (today mainly US evangelicals), Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists in this tradition have been and still are a central obstacle to peace in the area.

I much prefer the interpretation given in the text from the internet page on the memorials of the city of Darmstadt: The two steles stand separately and unconnected, but they are also close together, representing both their individuality and their dependence on each other – a sign of Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

Related posts:

1. Back to the Roots at Darmstadt, part 2

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