Reexamined lives

'Anti-Zionism cannot be, or at least can no longer be, a tenable position for the left in general, for the party, the Left, especially," said Gregor Gysi, the co-chairman of the Left, the successor political party to the Socialist Party of the now defunct East Germany (GDR), in mid-April.

A newly opened exhibition in Berlin's New Synagogue Berlin Centrum Judaicum Foundation is plunging Germans, particularly eastern Germans, into a reexamination of the anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism of the post-Nazi period in the GDR. The theme of the exhibit, "Between Staying and Going: Jews in East Germany, 1945-1956, 10 Biographies," is not simply another form of Germans "working through the past"; rather, it is the subject of a simmering debate within Germany's third largest political party, the Left.

Gysi broke ranks with the pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab foreign policy of his party, and his groundbreaking speech in which he castigated anti-Israeli sentiments within the party may help to trigger a long-overdue discussion covering left-wing anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. A BBC poll released in early April found 64 percent of Germans view Israel as having a negative influence in the world. While the number declined from 77% in a 2007 BBC poll, the new result, along with Spain (64%), represents the highest percentage of anti-Israeli feelings within the European Union. Contempt for Israel is not merely a current fad in Germany, but a politically and socially accepted view. The Left party has made considerable headway in winning new voters and, according to a recent poll, is supported by 12% of Germany's public.

The Left party is the third new manifestation of the GDR Socialist Unity Party (SED) in post-unification Germany. The SED renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in 1990 and then joined with a small leftist West German party, resulting in the Left Party/PDS in 2006. The disdain for Israel is a leftover vestige of the SED, which controlled the East German state and refused to recognize the State of Israel between 1949 and 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall led to its demise.

Gysi asserts that Israel's existence ought to be defined by the Left as part of Germany's "national interest." That is strong stuff for a party whose co-chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, has no reservations about a nuclear Iran.

Internal party arm-twisting forced Lafontaine to cancel his visit to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because the timing coincided with the Iranian Holocaust-denial conference in 2006, thus avoiding a public relations scandal for the Left.

The aggressive anti-Israelism of the Left party permeates the majority view of its leading politicians and members. This helps explain the contemporary significance of the exhibit, one of whose overriding themes is anti-Semitism disguised as overly critical anti-Israeli sentiments.

Gysi's speech is an attempt to blunt the pervasive loathing of Zionism among a sizable number of the Left party's rank-and-file and many of its parliamentary representatives. Gysi, whose father Klaus was Jewish and served as minister of culture and secretary of church affairs in East Germany, is seeking a break with a deeply anchored leftist dogma that characterizes Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East.

The Representatives' Hall, which lodges the exhibition and is situated on the first floor of the New Synagogue, is a painful reminder of the Jewish cultural and religious heritage that the Nazis wiped out. The New Synagogue was the largest in Germany with 3,200 members, and the hall served as the meeting room for the Assembly of Representatives and the Jewish Community Council. A lively mix of members encompassing Orthodox, liberal and Zionist outlooks met there to discuss community affairs. The state-sponsored November pogroms (Kristallnacht) in 1938, in which the synagogue was damaged, contributed to the rapid demise of the building. The last worship was held in 1940 and it was then used as a warehouse until Allied bombing destroyed it in 1943.

Though restoration of sections of the New Synagogue in 1995 may have brought back from oblivion a semblance of the architectural life of German Jewry, the vibrancy of current Jewish life in Berlin (12,000 members of the community) pales in comparison to the 173,000 Jews who resided in prewar Berlin.

Currently, the mid-sized prism-shaped hall contains a series of panels, which encircle the presentation of the 10 Jews and document the historical and political background of the period in which they were persecuted. The inner display contains 10 free-standing orange-brown columns, each blanketed with photos, court documents and newspaper articles capturing the new repression faced by each victim. The external panels delve into the "Consequences of anti-Jewish campaigns in the GDR"; the second-class status of Jewish Holocaust survivors who received less victims' compensation than communists and social democrats who survived extermination camps; and the continued desecration of Jewish cemeteries in post-WWII East and West Germany. One panel devotes space to the "political cleansing in Eastern Europe and an anti-Semitic secret trial in Moscow."

A television shows East German and Soviet documentary film footage (1945-1952) covering anti-Western propaganda; a show trial involving spy charges against an East German; the reburial of murdered extermination camp victims; and the United Nations partition plan for Palestine in 1947. One exhibition panel treats for the first time one of the most fascinating and painful chapters in the history of East German-Israeli relations, the Paul Merker affair.

"I am neither a Jew nor a Zionist, though certainly, it would not be a crime to be either," declared Merker, a member of the Communist Party's central committee, during the final phase of a vicious wave of GDR anti-Semitism in 1956.

CAN GYSI'S embrace of Israel be seen as an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Merker, whose tragic personal history is on display at the exhibit? A forgotten figure within the German left, Merker was the highest-level official within the party to support the founding of the State of Israel. He was incarcerated in 1952 for his passionate defense of Israel and his advocacy of financial compensation for Jews whose property had been "aryanized" by the Nazis. Following his release from prison in 1956, he was relegated to political obscurity by the GDR regime. His battle for political rehabilitation was an exercise in futility.