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A Night at the Cat Club

By on November 3, 2012
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German 2

This was how I met Heinrick, the Aryan Fantasy Poster Boy from Berlin. Of course, he was tall, blond and bronzed, with piercing eyes as clear and blue as Nordic skies. He was almost too pretty to be a man, and I found myself incredibly drawn to him. As he flailed around in English, I enjoyed his lilting accent and grammatical missteps, and when “99 Luft Balons” came on, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the center of the dance floor. Until the last haunting words of the song – “Denk’ an Dich und lass’ihn fliegen” (“I think of you and let it go”) – I let myself pass as German.

I’d never been romantically involved with someone from Germany — as much as I believe that you should never blame the children for the sins of their parents (or in Heinrick’s case, grandparents), I know myself well enough to realize that I’d somehow end up asking (at the most inopportune time imaginable) “so where were Oma and Opa back in 1941 when my relatives were being herded off to Auschwitz?” (Now, wouldn’t that make for a riveting discussion around the dinner table? And I suppose this begs the question, could I even break-bread with Oma and Opa when they might have been Nazis, or at least sympathetic to the regime?) And while forgiving the past is an integral part of healing old wounds, it’s kind of hard to forget that many (certainly not all, but indeed many) Germans were more than willing to wave Auf Wiedersehen to their Jewish friends and neighbors during Hitler’s Final Solution.

But still, Heinrick was hot, and as we danced, I decided that he was coming home with me, Opa’s (possible) membership in the SS be damned! Besides, I rationalized, maybe his family was part of the resistance movement, bravely risking their lives to fight Hitler’s regime! Hey, you never know until you ask. And to be honest, at that point, in a haze of liquor-lust, it didn’t really matter, because I knew that Heinrick was Berlin-bound the next day, and disclosing family history would be more appropriate for the second or third date that we’d never have. I decided to indulge in the fantasy, and skip the existential crisis. I asked him if he wanted to catch a cab with me back to Berkeley, and he grinned and playfully grabbed my ass. Nothing lost in translation there.

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Social media guru of Jewrotica, Sarah Tuttle-Singer is a writer for the Times of Israel and Huffington Post. Sarah lives in Israel with her two children and is - in her own words - quite dangerous when bored.
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