How to talk about the unspeakable

The question remains, how do you talk so as to not sound like a Nazi when the presumption is that you have something to hide? The surest and simplest way is to speak knowingly and sensitively about the Holocaust. You can be "a good German" who instantly displays his thorough knowledge of and engagement with the Holocaust. This maneuver requires you to always be ready to make a transition from summer vacation to Auschwitz. Perhaps your summer vacation was spent visiting Auschwitz, taking in the museum.

The tiresome part is having to be so thoroughly virtuous in everything you say. For years I was the straight man in any conversation about the Holocaust. My friends cracked the jokes, and I made earnest replies. This seriousness was eventually unbearable, and so a new sort of irony set in. With a couple of my oldest friends, it is really just a matter of time before the word "Auschwitz" is uttered. This has the strange effect that we can talk anywhere and at anytime about the Holocaust, in a serious knowing but light-hearted way. Still, the roles are assigned, who gets to crack the joke, who plays the straight man. Germans make excellent straight men, but then again I was grateful to be included, happy to play in a role in a game that offered redemption from the permanent ostracism of my childhood.

No matter what diner we're in, what street we are walking down, eventually there is a transition from trivia to genocide, from baseball to Auschwitz. The two have nothing to do with each other, but at some point the connection has to be made. "Jeter isn't as bulky as A-Rod, he probably doesn't work out as much. Well, but he's still pretty fit. I mean the guy can run, he's not like he's skinny, it's not like he just got liberated from a camp." There we have it, 14 seconds, a new record.

After years of watching this pattern, I finally mentioned it, assuming that everyone else knew it, too. That's when an awkward silence finally kicked in, for the first time in decades. "I am not the one who brought up Auschwitz. It was Ari." "No way. You started talking about train schedules when we got out of the subway." Another two years passed before we were rid of our new middle aged, meta-self-consciousness. For months thereafter we all stopped and counted out how long it took one of us to mention the Holocaust. Eventually, one of us would make the move, just to relieve the tension. In time we fell back into our old habit of sneaking in Auschwitz when you least suspected it.

This style of conversation freaks people out if they haven't heard it before, especially other good Germans who don't understand how anyone can switch in one breath from reminiscing about a high school girlfriend's breasts to the freight station in Paris where Jews were herded into cattle cars. No doubt both topics are with us forever. The jokes mark a collective remembering, a group activity that does not force me stand as the perpetrator, but allows me to mourn, even while dancing away from the misery of having just the one horrible truth define my entire life.

But now in a new medium, a new question arises, how long did it take this blog to land on this topic, --a year, pretty slow, but then again how do you blog about genocide without becoming grim. And after all, this blog is still just an academic monologue full of earnest phrases, it lacks the banter of high school friends.