Judenstaat

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One morning, I was lying in bed with my husband, and I said, “What if a Jewish state had been established in Germany after the war?”

The very idea was a provocation. Yet I continued to consider: If Theodor Herzl was right when he wrote Der Judenstaat in 1896, and the only answer to what he called “the Jewish Question” was a Jewish state, then what if that state had been established as a kind of national project of reparation and even retribution for the Holocaust? How would that shape its history and a politics and national character? I think I speculated out loud for a while—it’s that kind of marriage—and then my husband went to brush his teeth, returned, and said, “What about the Soviet Union?”

What about the Soviet Union? It existed. So did Stalin, who might have had his own plans for a Jewish homeland; he had created one called Birobidjan and slaughtered most of its inhabitants in purges. What about East Germany? It didn’t exist, or more precisely, this country would encompass much of its territory, though its borders, I decided, would be those of Saxony, east of Berlin. And yes, there’s a wall; it keeps out German fascists. The story begins in 1987. The wall is about to fall.

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