Welcome to a new edition of the Wirklichkeit Books Newsletter. Before leaving you with Alex Cocotas’s short story My Confession, allow us to remind you that our books are great gifts. Recent titles include The New Fascist Body / Der neue faschistische Körper, Hierarchies of Solidarity, Gaza im Auge der Geschichte and the limited Publishing as a Way of Creating Wirklichkeit slipcase. Visit our website to browse through the full catalog.
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Sehr geehrter Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für jüdisches Leben in Deutschland und den Kampf für Anti-Antisemitismus Felix Klein,
I have come to ask for your forgiveness. I have come to turn myself in. I have come to make my confession: I am an antisemite. What’s worse, I am a Jewish antisemite.
It has come to my attention, Mr. Klein, that in Germany, it is not allowed to write Jewish characters with negative attributes. This offends German sensibilities, because the Jewish people are good and unworthy of being pilloried by German perceptions, and is therefore antisemitic. But why should these safeguards be confined strictly to the realm of fiction? Should the German people not also be shielded from the implicit antisemitic threat inherent in the presence of actual Jews? I have deduced from this the logical inference that we are not allowed to be Jewish writers with negative characteristics, and in this I have failed you, Mr. Klein, I have failed Germany, where I have now lived for nearly a decade with the unspoken burden of this sin, and so I have come to confess.
Mr. Klein, when I was twenty-two years old, I had a wet dream in Jerusalem. This is our holy city, as you know. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may I lose my left hand, wrote one of our great poets. Every year we say, “Next year in Jerusalem,” and I had finally done it, I had arrived, and I was lying there covered in an unseemly discharge of my own would-be descendants. You can imagine my horror as it dawned on me what I had done. We were supposed to visit the Wailing Wall that day, the holiest site in Judaism, and I had unwittingly desecrated the temple that is my body while sleeping. The night before this catastrophe, I had received a massage from a woman I was attracted to—“You’re so tense!” she told me—and the night before that I had dreamt about my grandmother, whose dream it was, incidentally, to live in Israel, the realization of which I unfortunately prevented by being born, because, as she said, she wanted to see me grow old, and would, as a result of this determination, instead grow old in a decrepit care home, where she would die from dementia when I was seven years old, having achieved neither of these dreams before her death, nor, thankfully, having lived long enough to know that this grandson of hers (that’s me) was now living in Germany, which I can’t imagine she would have been too happy about, because she had expressly forbidden any of her children (but not her grandchildren!) from visiting the country where she was born and raised. I don’t know if there is any connection between these events: the sacred retaining wall, the abrasive dreamscape, my self-defilement. The proximity of the two dreams was certainly unsettling. It is unnerving to dream about your dead grandmother one night then to wake up doused by your own ejaculate the following night, an act which required neither my left nor right hand to produce an unforgettable demonstration of premature stirrings. This is unbecoming of me as a Jew in Germany, Mr. Klein, and unfortunately it is only one of my many failings.
You see, Mr. Klein, impure thoughts are a problem of mine, and not only during subconscious hours of slumber. I confess: I have had impure thoughts about German women. Sometimes I fantasize about them bossing me around. “Make my breakfast, Jew!” she would command. Even worse, I’ve always hoped she would have some electrifyingly Aryan name like Helga. “Why don’t you floss, you slovenly kike?” Helga might chastise me. Wouldn’t that be funny! But it is not funny: Dental hygiene is of the utmost importance. I have also joked that German women could use me as a sexual conduit for expunging their guilt, but this is not funny either, because the question of German guilt is a serious topic, and we should not question it. I know it is wrong of me to have such thoughts, Mr. Klein, but this mind of mine just keeps racing, racing, racing ahead… Have you ever noticed that a mulberry resembles a prolapsed anus? These are the sort of thoughts I am regularly subjected to, Mr. Klein. In truth, I’m not sure I even know what a mulberry nor a prolapsed anus looks like. I just like the way “mulberry” and “prolapsed anus” sounds in close proximity to one another, and it is undoubtedly these degenerate flourishes in my thinking which you are trying to prevent from entering into my writing, which might thereby give the German public a poor impression of the Jewish people, because it is wrong to project our fantasies onto others on the basis of nebulous assumptions, and the Jewish people are good; and although I am beyond grateful for your efforts on my behalf I sometimes despair that I have arrived too late to this country to ever fully correct these flaws in my character, which are hardly confined to invisible defects in my thinking.
I do not floss, Mr. Klein.
In fact, one might say I have a problem with women in general. The best friend of my first high school girlfriend, herself a woman, called me “an asshole with no taste for tactfulness” after my first high school girlfriend, who was also a woman, broke up with me. And do you know why she had broken up with me? Because I had broken the law. You see, one of my classmates had discovered that our local strip club, which was named “The Pink Poodle,” did not verify that its prospective patrons were eighteen years of age, as required by law, and I had gone with twenty or so other underage boys from my school to hoot and holler and generally enjoy the spectacle of naked women gyrating their denuded lady parts on stage. We shamelessly threw dollar bills at them to further incentivize this behavior. Which was not, I must unfortunately admit, my only misallocation of productive capital that evening. With the encouragement of a few school fellows doing the same, I used my weekly allowance to procure the services of a particularly buxom woman named Brenda for a lap dance, this Brenda who was to haunt my imagination for many months after, and my first high school girlfriend found out about this illicit outing of ours—in truth, we were none too secretive about our criminal behavior—and was so shocked by my flagrant disregard for legal norms that she broke up with me. It is tasteless to break the law, Mr. Klein, and tactless to flaunt the violation. This is undoubtedly what my first girlfriend’s best friend meant with this obscure phrase—calling me “an asshole with no taste for tactfulness,”—and I profess it is a foul taint on my character, and as such a taint on the great nation of Germany, a country which venerates the law, where rules are respected, where rules are rules, and which once legally stripped my family of their glorious nationality, and thus I am a taint on the Jewish people writ large, poisoned from within by my person in the eyes of this unimpeachable state.
And I further confess, Mr. Klein: my first high school girlfriend was not Jewish. She was a goy named Monica. Nor were any of my school chums Jewish. In fact, I could accurately be described as a rank assimilationist who has been unduly influenced by the gentile world to the wanton detriment of my Jewish purity. In truth, I’ve only really dated one Jewish woman in my entire life and have demonstrated objective indifference to the perpetuation of the Jewish people through procreation, a source of much grief to my family, and especially to my mother, who was too tactful to out and out demand such a thing, and yet I was nonetheless aware of her desires and too tactless to yield my productive seed up to them, a matter of some concern in my family, you see, because there were not too many of us left after the war. And I’m afraid this is hardly the worse of my numerous, infamous infractions against my mother.
The following is something I’ve never told anyone, Mr. Klein, but this is a confession, and so I feel obligated to unburden the multiplying, pullulating sins of my life: When I was 14 or 15 years old, I called my mother a bitch. Yes, I know… Yes, Mr. Klein, I know. There was no immediate impetus for this calumny, at least not that I can remember. I distinctly remember the temptation to call her a bitch just to see what the effect would be, not unlike, I imagine, the temptation to other destructive acts, such as the time I briefly considered smashing the headlight of my mother’s horridly ugly station wagon, a car that could only be described as an aesthetic terror, a source of immense shame when she drove me to the school of the rich gentile children who were fond of saying “Don’t Jew me!” or “Don’t be a Jew!” and where I was one of two Jewish students and, incredibly, we both had the same name, and I had considered doing this, smashing out the headlight of this aesthetic terror with a baseball bat, for the sheer thrill of doing it, but the headlight evaded my whimsical fury, restrained by a sudden incursion of conscience, which apparently felt no such similar need to protect my mother. Yes, Mr. Klein, I called my mother a bitch on the basis of an adolescent thought experiment. The effect, as might be expected, was immense. I think it could be fairly said that I ruined Mother’s Day that year. She was crying over her lox, a special treat every year on this day, which I had now irreparably marred with my philosophical investigations, and that image is branded onto my memory, because, as I’m sure you know, us Jewish sons love our Jewish mothers, this is practically our credo. If I forget thee, O Mother, thy guilt has never left, as one of our great poets wrote. Perhaps you are familiar with this guilt, Mr. Klein, but this guilt, I must assure you, is rather different than your guilt, because our guilt, somewhat mysteriously, only induces further displays of outrageous behavior and further opportunities for recriminations, and thus further inventories in our ever-expanding stores of guilt, whereas your guilt, by which I mean the guilt of the German people, has become an opportunity to collectively learn from the past and remedy the errors of your parents and grandparents, such as how the Jews were once bad but are now good, because the Jewish people are good. Unless, like myself, they have run afoul of this essential trait, in which case this country has charitably set up a mechanism for rectifying the error. Rules are, alas, rules, and just as the German people have loudly and proudly confessed their guilt in order to rid themselves of antisemitic prejudices, so I appear before you today to do the same, to publicly atone for my transgressions and thereby alleviate the German people of the antisemitic prejudices embodied in my person.
Unfortunately, Mr. Klein, I’ve not only exercised these infamies upon my mother. My father has freely shared in the innumerable griefs I’ve heaped upon my family. I am very close with my father, Mr. Klein, we share a passion for complaining about my mother’s cooking, which was so predictable and repetitive that I once staged a protest as a child and posted my demands for a dinner other than eviscerated roast chicken with charred vegetables onto our fridge as though I were a diminutive Martin Luther nailing his theses onto the church door, but I will tell you a secret that not even he knows. When I was ten years old, Mr. Klein, I discovered the wonders of online pornography. During the summer school break of that year, my family had installed a computer with an internet connection in our home. When my parents went out of the house to labor for my comfort, I would settle in to leisurely peruse the astounding abundance of such material easily accessed with a few simple keywords. I promptly became obsessed with one website, in particular, which featured interviews with its various models, who had names like “Jennifer” and “Kimberley.” One of them was named “Katy” and you can imagine my wide-eyed astonishment when she told the interviewer that she liked to go to bars in her free time and give random men blowjobs! As you can imagine my disappointment when I finally started going to bars years later and learned that no such thing was happening there. I read through these interviews every day like a Talmudic sage searching for some hidden code of hermeneutics until one day I accidentally discovered there was something called a “search history” which was simultaneously logging my scholarly efforts stroke-by-stroke. Thrown into a panic, I decided to ward off the danger by alerting my parents to some strange entries I found in the browser’s history folder—which, incidentally, I just happened to be looking at! “Are you sure you didn’t look at these websites?” they asked me. “Of course I didn’t!” I answered with cherubic innocence. The matter was dropped. Or so I thought.
A few weeks later, I went grocery shopping with my mother. After she turned off the engine of the scandalously ugly station wagon, she suddenly turned to me and said, “You can tell me the truth about whether you were looking at those websites. Be honest with me.” I did the responsible thing and confessed—I confessed that it was beyond insulting that she could even conceive that I, her only son, was capable of such things! The matter was never discussed again after this. Problem solved. Or so I thought. You see, Mr. Klein, I remembered this story two decades later and finally understood something that had eluded my ten-year old intellect. What had actually happened in this moment, I suddenly realized, was that she was asking me whether it was my father who was looking at these websites. And I threw him under the bus! My own father! This gentle, patient, sexless man! She thought he was communing with these “Jennifers” and “Kimberleys” and “Katys” in his spare time! He was probably never allowed to go to a bar again! Can you believe it, Mr. Klein? Not only had I lied, but I threw my own flesh and blood into the meatgrinder that was my mother’s wrath! But perhaps you can sympathize me on this count, Mr. Klein. Small distortions of the truth can have unintended consequences, such as how the widespread perception that you are Jewish, a belief perhaps furthered by an interview with your alma mater in which you claimed as much, may lead people to believe you are representing the views of the Jewish people when you endorse ethnic cleansing in Gaza, congregate with Christian fundamentalists, deflect criticism of right-wing extremists, or instigate smear campaigns against left-wing intellectuals—with the slight distinction that I actually looked at those websites, whereas you are not Jewish.
Mr. Klein, I have recently become aware of a new Bundestag resolution to combat antisemitism entitled “Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany,” which explicitly praises your work on behalf of the Jewish people in Germany. In addition to the forgoing character flaws, it seems I could now be labeled an antisemite in this country, according to the resolution, if I should harshly criticize the state of Israel, which officials like yourself like to call “the homeland of the Jewish people.” If, for example, I would write, Israel is a barbarically stupid country where Jewish intelligence goes to rot and die, it appears I could now be classified as an antisemite by German officials. Or, to take another example, if I was to write, Israel is the prolapsed anus of Jewish history, I fear that I would now be categorized as an antisemite in this country that was once the homeland of my forebearers. Or, finally, if I were to write, You know what reality I worry will burden my would-be descendants when they awake to the world? Apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and may I lose my left hand if I ever forget it, I would evidently be deemed an irredeemable antisemite in Germany, where my family’s own long history abruptly came to a halt last century. If I was to write any of those things, Mr. Klein, it seems I would be designated an antisemite by you or one of your fellow colleagues in anti-antisemitism, all of whom, like yourself, are not Jewish. You are the experts, after all, and rules are rules, and so, in deference to the norms of my adopted homeland, I will defer to your expertise, which is why I will never write such things.
You see, Mr. Klein, I am learning! Maybe there’s hope for me yet! I am thankful to live in a state that lavishes such attention on my defects in order to prevent me from impugning the good reputation of my people; for such attention, I know, is indistinguishable from love. Perhaps even my grandmother would be proud of me if she was still with us today. Finally, Germany loves someone in this family! And so, Mr. Klein, I am asking you, by the power invested in you by your office: good Jew me. Good Jew the bad Jew out of me, Mr. Klein! Say to me, “Don’t be a Jew!” A bad Jew, I mean, of course. Tell me I should floss, Mr. Klein. Please, I beg of you. I’ll do anything! I’ll even make you breakfast…
Alex Cocotas is a writer, photographer, and translator living in Berlin. His journalism, criticism and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Baffler, Cabinet Magazine, and The Paris Review, among others.