Without the Leaves, I Would Not Have Started

Without the leaves, I would not have started

In autumn 2016, while walking in Berlin, I fell under the spell of rustling leaves. It happened while I was moving aimlessly, not seeking anything, in a place where I didn’t really want to be and where I might not have stayed had it not been for a fortune printed on the label of a teabag: “Lasse die Dinge zu Dir kommen” (Let things come to you). The decaying leaves blown over the pavement were actually the first things that came to me; they immediately resonated with my state of heart and with an emerging vision of photography. I began to spend hours a day observing and photographing them—their structure, their colors, their movement, their varying states of decomposition. Designed to fall, they reminded me of the power of surrender, of no longer hunting, but rather trusting, letting go, listening, and then embracing. They thus set the mode for a new project, on which, without knowing it, I had already embarked. It was almost as if the photographs were starting to take me more than I was taking them. Leaves were always with me in Berlin, as I was blown through this endeavor. They guided me to the first portrait: a man who seems to have dropped to the ground like a falling leaf.

For some Germans, to redeem themselves means they have to redeem their relationship with the Jews, while for others this has meant converting to Judaism. “There is a tendency to identify with the victims,” says Cilly Kugelmann, the former program director of the Jewish Museum. “Emotionally, you become a victim yourself and you erase the deeds of your forefathers.” For Elad Lapidot, an Israeli philosopher living in Berlin, “the Protestants of the nineteenth century are no longer anti-Semites nor philo-Semites. They have become Jews. They have eliminated otherness by becoming the other.” Berlin is home to a growing number of German Christians who have converted to Judaism; some men and women have gone even further, becoming rabbis and training a new generation of rabbis in Europe, many of them also converts. Indeed, two of the most famous synagogues in Berlin are led by converts, and a significant portion of the congregants are also recent converts to Judaism. “It’s horrible, they all love the Jews,” says Irene Runge, a German Jew from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Some say that Israelis are drawn to Berlin merely because it is a more affordable version of Tel Aviv. But it is obvious that many are leaving Israel because they have lost all hope in the political and economic future of the country and don’t want to be accomplices of a government they see as oppressing another people, the Palestinians. “Young Israelis have the feeling they were emptied of something in their beings that they don’t even recognize,” says historian Dan Diner. “They are here to search for something which was avoided and repressed by an ideology that wanted to redeem the Diaspora Jew and create a new Jew.” The presence in Berlin of a significant community of Palestinians—refugees from Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, and sometimes all three—complicates the story even more, scrambling notions of victim and perpetrator, reconciliation and redemption. “With Jews, Germans have a wonderful story: Love – Shoah – Redemption,” says Yossi Bartal, an Israeli who created a platform for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in Berlin. “Palestinians are a disturbance.” Many Israelis remain ambivalent about the country they have left, but no less about the country in which they have settled, worrying that they will always remain characters in someone else’s play—Jews for Germans rather than German Jews. And so Berlin becomes yet another laboratory for “the New Jew.”

These crisscrossing vectors of social and emotional trauma have turned Berlin into an incubator of paradox and dissonance, as groups and individuals try to escape an overloaded history and reinvent themselves in an open society that allows all narratives to coexist: the Australian opera director who declares himself a “Jewish gay kangaroo” and makes it his task “to put his finger deep in the German wound;” the Palestinian woman who immigrates to Germany on an Israeli passport, a symbol of her family’s catastrophe; the Israeli philosopher who prides himself on being part of the “first Aliyah” from Israel to Germany and for whom the very condition of the Jew is to be a stranger; the German Christian convert who becomes a rabbi and founds the first Jewish School of Theology in postwar Germany; the Israeli psychoanalyst who feels ashamed of her mother’s Moroccan heritage, identifying instead with her father’s Ashkenazi roots, but who, after moving to Berlin and marrying a German Christian, confronts the perpetrator within and embraces her Arab identity; the German Jew, whose parents fled Nazi Germany to New York, returns after the war to realize the socialist dream of the GDR, becomes a Stasi agent, and now edits the local Chabad magazine; the New Yorker who settles in Berlin and is presented to me as the Holocaust survivor pet of German society.

The past, the ghosts, victims, perpetrators, exile and migration, otherness, sameness, inversion, conversion, redemption, appropriation, commemoration, celebration, performance, identity, fear, territory, trompe l’oeil, entertainment, tyranny of representation, commodification, fragmentation, confusion, disintegration, chaos, and, of course, the leaves... How to do justice to all this and still resist the temptation to make sense of it? I have attempted to move through this constellation of unresolved tensions and dissolving boundaries with my camera—immersed in narratives, but not bound by any of them, engaging in conversations of which the photographs and words are echoes—but most of all, embracing the invitation to listen to that “mumble of the invisible” and daring to lean into the void.

Frédéric Brenner is known for exploring questions of longing, belonging and exclusion. His major opus, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile is the result of a twenty-five-year search in over forty countries to create a visual record of the Jewish people at the end of the twentieth century.

This text is taken from the book ZERHEILT; published by Hatje Cantz, August 2021.