MAXIMILIAN CZOLLEK ORAL HISTORY

TANYA PANOVA: I'm Tanya Panova, and today is January 24th, 2018. We're here in Berlin with Max Czollek, Maximilian Czollek, and we're going to record an interview for the Wexler Oral History and the Yiddish Book Center. Do I have your permission to record?

MAXIMILIAN CZOLLEK: Yes.

TP: Thank you so much. So, to start out, I wanted to ask you what you know about your family background, your grandfathers and grandmothers.

MC: Down to my grandfathers, it's not that difficult to reconstruct, because that all happened -- at least what happened after the war and during the war. 1:00But if I go back a bit more on the Jewish side of my family, it's getting very difficult. There's really, like -- a very typical Eastern European Ashkenazi story, I'd say. There's not much I know, and there's a lot of fantasy and rumors and myths that surround the whole story. As far as I know, my Jewish family came from Galicia, a little village, shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community], and they came to Germany to work in the textile factories, in the center of Germany. And the family itself was pretty big and extended, and all of them perished in the Holocaust except my grandfather. So, he came back after the -- he spent his -- he went to Kat Zet [German: concentration camp] because he was a communist and a Jew, and then he went to Shanghai to exile, and then he came back after the war to the GDR, as a communist, which he still was. 2:00But his family had been very Jewish, and -- you'd probably call this Orthodox today. And he spoke fluent Yiddish and surrounded himself with Jewish and Yiddish-speaking friends in Eastern Germany. The Jews in Eastern Germany, basically they're -- were almost all communist, and almost all of them kind of moved in smaller circles of survivors of what you could call a Schicksalgemeinshaft, people who shared the same fate. So --

TP: What do you know of his life in Shanghai?

MC: In Shanghai? I actually once went there. I took the Trans-Siberian train through Russia, which is where we met in Moscow, and then I moved through Mongolia to Shanghai to see the place where he had spent -- seven years of his life? Seven and a half? And there's not much left because the Chinese government 3:00doesn't really care for Jewish history in China. I mean, why should they? It was a real exile community. Shanghai was the last port that didn't require visas, so that was practically the last place to go to. My grandfather helped, supported, maybe had an important position in a communist Soviet Chinese radio station which they did, which was kinda underground. So, I can't really tell you much more about that. This is where we're already entering the field of rumors and myths. But as far as I know, he was working for a communist radio in China. And when he came back, he was leading a publishing house in Eastern Germany, which is called "Volk und Welt [German: People and the World]." They published more international books, which were checked and allowed to be printed in the GDR.

TP: You said that this side of your family is traditionally Eastern German Jewish? What do you mean by that?

MC: Well, one side of what I said was ironical in saying that it's a very Eastern European Jewish history because I don't know much about it because it was destroyed, basically. But also because the Jewish side is just very Ashkenazi. It's like, there's -- they came from the shtetls in Eastern Europe, they spoke Yiddish, and they had a very strong connection to this whole Yiddish, communist, working-class language and culture and tradition, which I feel doesn't really have an echo space in the current German Jewish Yiddish circles. Except if we're talking about new klezmer music. I think this is the only place, 5:00which was reimported back from YIVO archive and the Yiddish music in the States, where this tradition has kind of been preserved. But this is a tradition I'd count myself to, like -- for myself, if I'm thinking about a Yiddish heritage, it'd be a critical Left socialist tradition. Which is also tradition of amazing art that has been done during that time, which kinda has been covered twice. It has been covered because there's a lack of understanding the language. Yiddish sounds kind of German, but it's written in Hebrew, in Hebrew letters. So, if you wanna read Yiddish original poetry, you gotta learn Hebrew letters, which means 6:00that ninety-nine percent of the people are just not gonna read Yiddish poetry. And also because obviously of the destruction of the Yiddish cultural space through the Nazis, but then again also by Soviet Russia for decades after, the destruction where a self-aware Jewish cultural position was not really endeared or supported by the government.

TP: This publishing house your grandfather ran, what was it focused on?

MC: It focused on international literature, basically, and a few classics of German Jewish and German left-wing intellectual writing. But it was a state-run publishing house, as every publishing house in the GDR was. And it was called "Volk und Welt," the People and the World. And they also published the collected 7:00work of Kurt Tucholsky. And Kurt Tucholsky has been something like a family idol or family icon ever since I was very little, as someone who was political and literal and artistic and especially an intellectual. So, you could say being Jewish has always meant also being an intellectual, in a way.

TP: You said your grandfather and his family, they spoke Yiddish, and they had Ashkenazic background. Did they speak Yiddish to their children, your parents?

MC: No, not more than I think has been the case after the war in very different places, that they kinda did use a few slang words, a few, like, Yiddishisms, you 8:00could call them in German. Once a year, they'd hand out matzah to everyone for a week, but did not explain why. You had this really weird kind of implicit tradition that was not voiced, that was not made explicit, that nobody really talked about openly. So, it was up to my aunt and my father to rediscover whatever Jewish and Yiddish tradition also had been covered. Which for my aunt meant moving closer to Judaism as a religion and moving in liberal, Reform Jewish circles in the late GDR in the '80s. For my father, who was a singer and an artist, it also meant to start focusing much more on a Yiddish music 9:00tradition, a tradition of Yiddish poetry, and starting to work them into his own work and his own songs and his own writing.

TP: So, since it became his profession, do you have some exposure to it at home as a kid?

MC: Say that again?

TP: Could you hear some Jewish music, songs?

MC: Oh yes, for sure. I was like, every night I would fall asleep with those songs, with this mix of Yiddish and socialist music, which was really cool. If I listened to it now -- like "Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letsn veg [Never say that you are walking the final path]" or "Shtil [Silent]" -- like, the Hirsch Glick tradition, or if you're talking about songs from the Spanish Civil War, we're talking about "A-F-pey-O mir zaynen do [AFPO, we are here]," and all this stuff which really, I've never really met anyone knowing this music in Germany, 10:00except somebody like Daniel Kahn, who is doing this professionally. So, yes, I'd go to sleep to this music. And it really formed the basis of whatever musical education and literal education I had as a very small child. And then, like, at a certain moment -- my father passed away when I was twelve, and then there was a period of five, six years where I maybe didn't really have the capacities to reconnect to whatever had been sealed off by his death, really. And that took a while, until I started actively looking for my own ways to reconnect to this tradition and my own ways to rediscover and update those approaches and those 11:00attitudes and those perspectives.

TP: You were born in GDR, right, in East Berlin?

MC: Mm.

TP: Did your family have any relatives in West Berlin, or friends?

MC: Very few. I mean, having relatives and friends in West Berlin or West Germany was an asset, right, because they could send you coffee and jeans and whatever you needed. LPs. Not really. Things got -- things were complicated in my family, also because my grandfather belonged to what you call "Nomenklatura," like the ruling class, elite, if you want so. He passed away in the '70s. I never met him. And my father got really sick in the '80s. So, as the GDR wasn't 12:00afraid of people who were really sick to leave the country, which is a bit cynical, they allowed him to leave the country. So, he was able to go to West Berlin from the mid-'80s on. So, we didn't really need any relatives. He was actually moving in and out of West Berlin. But besides that, no. People keep on asking me if I have family in Israel. I don't, because I don't really have family. So, there's not really anyone who could live in Israel for sure. I haven't really talked about the German side of my family, but this is my mother's side, and it's also very, very small. It's just her and her two sisters and their children and that's it, because my grandma and grandfather on my mother's side also passed away before I was born or shortly after I was born. So, really living with the fragments of whatever history and family could have 13:00been there, like, living with a non-realized potential, if you want so, has been the marker and still is the marker of how I perceive my own relation to family. If I look at families in other -- of my friends, if I see how those families are -- not only bigger, but also their histories are less broken. And I just feel like there's a proper -- like a -- a transformation or like the family that should have been there has been shifted to the side of the spirits or something. It's like, they kind of resurrect or they have been inscribed into the poetry and the songs and the texts I read and I sing and I hear. And it feels like 14:00there's a proper -- there's a proper citizenship or a proper amount of people living in the house of the dead, which is not really a forgotten house, but it's something that I constantly move in and out of. Which doe-- it sounds horrible. It sounds like a horror movie. But it's not. It feels like there's a full amount of people who I can use as a support for whatever I do. But they're simply not here. They're not here in a physical way. We couldn't touch them. I couldn't really touch their bodies. But I feel like we can talk. And this is through that. It's through poetry. It's through art. It's through reconnecting to this 15:00tradition that I am able to talk to those people.

TP: And apart from tradition and literature, you do have some stories. Where do you know them from?

MC: Well, I know my -- where I take my stories from?

TP: Yeah.

MC: I mean, poetry's not necessarily a storytelling business, right?

TP: Yeah, I mean, you know something about your grandfather and also your parents?

MC: Ah. Well, yeah, this is through my father and my aunt. My father, even though he died when I was very young, he already had told me different stories. But also, there are contradictions. Then my father wrote this account of my grandfather's life in Eastern Europe and my grandmother's life, and then he'd tell a story, but as it is literal I don't really know if it's fictional, 16:00because literature's always also fiction, and you can't really differentiate between the two. But my father wasn't really a scientist, and the purpose of this text was not science, so I don't know. And I can't really ask him. So, really what we do have is a lot of different stories.

TP: Were those stories published, or did they stay in the family?

MC: No, they're mine. They're mine. And I'm very -- as I said, I think it's part of my very intimate field of dialogue with the dead that it already -- at least not now -- I don't really feel like it'd be the right time to publish that. It's really something that belongs to me.

TP: I see. But you use it.

MC: I do use it a lot. And -- yeah. I do use it a lot.

TP: Then, I was wondering, can you briefly tell me what your formal education 17:00is? What was the school you went to?

MC: I was in Jewish school, really, for thirteen years. The first Jewish school ever was founded -- after the war -- was founded in Berlin in 1993. And then, 1994, I entered the school -- did I? Ninety-four, '93? And that was in Berlin Mitte. That was right after the fall of the wall. That was in the old people's nursing home of the Jewish community. It had been used as a center for deportation. Then it had really gone out of use for a long time, and then the Jewish community had reconstructed it. The reason for this school to be refounded, of course, was the influx of Soviet Jews to Berlin, which until 2005 18:00measured up to ninety percent of the Jewish community in Germany today. So, you could really say that the Jewish community today would be dead if it wasn't for the Soviet Jews that came, that were invited. And to school all those children, but also to kinda school through the children the parents in what Jewish religion, Jewish life, Jewish thought could mean, this school was founded as kinda integration/socializing institution. And I think it worked pretty well. And during those first years, there was a very special constellation of East German parents sending their non-Jewish kids to that school, parents like my parents sending their, let's say, Jewish-communist-whatever children to that school, and Soviet Jews moving to West Berlin, sending their West Berlin 19:00children to that school, who started to make fun of us East Berliners, though they had come from Soviet Union. So, you had a really weird and interesting situation. And then, you have the Israeli teachers who taught us Hebrew coming from Israel being taught in Heidelberg, a very West German town, and coming to East Berlin to teach us. So, you had an actual post-migrant situation in that school. People were speaking Hebrew and of course Russian a lot, German of course, and it kinda had this beauty of confusion that you sometimes find in diverse spaces. So, I'd say the school was an actually -- a very intense 20:00experience, considering the diversity of Judaism in Germany today. So, you actually had a good image of how this diversity looks like.

TP: What was Jewish of this school apart from that you had Hebrew lessons?

MC: We also had Bible studies. No, you had to wear kippah, in the dining room, dining hall, you celebrated all the Jewish festivals. In school you took -- you got days off for those festivals, so we always had more days off than the regular schools. You had -- I mean, the teacher staff was different. You wouldn't find those kind of staff because there were a lot of Jewish teachers too. You were allowed in your higher grades to attend Jewish philosophy as a course, which you can't do anywhere else. I did that. I think it helped me a lot. I think it actually taught me a lot about many things that I could use 21:00during my studies, which I started in 2007. I did my high school exam -- "Abitur," you call it -- in 2006, took half a year off, and then I started studying political sciences. And after I'd done that, I even did my PhD on studies of anti-Semitism. So, I kinda did a full circle. I came from school. I thought like, Okay, that's about it. Thirteen years of Jewish school, I really do not care to kinda do this whole Jewish thing anymore. So, I did political sciences in the biggest political institute in Germany, Otto Suhr Institute in Freie University in Berlin. But then, at a certain point I realized that I had been attending a space that had been run by Jews. And it had been -- where the majority had been Jewish. Which was really a unique experience, if you think 22:00about it, in Germany after the war. You had never had this before. Ever since '93, ever since the school was founded, it was not possible for Jewish children to attend an institution or to go to school with a majority Jewish surrounding. You always had the German surrounding. And we can talk about what it actually means for Jews to grow up in a majority-German surrounding after the war. I think there's an actual difference in identity and self-definition once you enter a majority-Jewish space. And when I was studying, just then, a Jewish scholarship network was established a few years after I had started. So, I could -- for the last years of my studies and for my PhD, I was actually funded by this Jewish scholarship network, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerke, a Jewish 23:00scholarship network run -- funded by the state. And again, that was something that for Jewish students had not been possible before. So, the point I'm trying to make is that there is an actual difference of my generation to all the other generations before --- like, the two generations before -- that came after the war, not only because we're further away from the trauma itself, but also because the Jewish community today is much more diverse and relies much more on diverse institutions than it has been the case before.

TP: You also mentioned that some of the students were not Jewish in these schools.

MC: Mm.

TP: How did it work? Did they have to wear kippahs, too?

MC: Yes, they had to -- yeah. There was no problem in accepting them. It was always like, two-thirds, one-third, until today. Because there're simply not that many Jewish students, or maybe not that many smart Jewish students. Because 24:00it's a gymnasium, which means not everyone is allowed in. So, they fill it up, basically. But also they think -- the school is called Moses Mendelssohn Schule [German: school] -- gymnasium. And Moses Mendelssohn -- you know, he had the whole Jewish Enlightenment and thought about connecting the Jewish and the German side and all that. So, it's actually part of the concept of that school to combine the German and the Jewish side, not to isolate them from each other. So yes, they had to wear kippah, yes, they had to not -- they were not allowed to bring pork, like ham. But then again, that was hard enough for the Russian Jewish students as well, so -- not bringing ham is really not qualifying you as a non-Jew or Jew if I look around me.

TP: To move further, you said you studied political sciences and then came back 25:00to studies of anti-Semitism here. How did it happen?

MC: Yeah. I don't know, when did that happen. I think there's -- once you realize as a Jew that you're living in a non-Jewish majority environment that is motivated by different desires than yourself, and it is -- has a different set of sensibilities and perceptions for whatever's going on around them, then you have to decide what to do. You can either try to blend in; you can try to be just like them. You can try just to claim your Jewish perspective and position as something private, something that is disconnected from your outside. Which is 26:00possible, but it means that you're defenseless. It means that once people start using your Jewish side for whatever they want to use it, it means that you are not prepared. Because you have claimed it to be private. The funny thing is that the Jewish side in Germany is never private. It's always public. It's public because the German public acts as if the history of my family would be public history, as if it would be something everybody can use. Which I feel is kind of -- I feel it as a violation of my privacy, actually. I feel like they are starting to use a part of my history without my permission. Which I know -- of course, journalism, that's what they do, right? But I think it's a very specific 27:00part in the power relationship between the German mainstream and the Jewish side that the Jewish side is so small and in a way is being overused by a German desire to reconstruct themselves as good and better Germans. Germans want to be good and bad after the Second -- not good and bad; they want to be good and better -- after the Second World War. Why? Well, of course, because they know they messed up, because it's one of the most horrific things for a national identity to have done something like this. So, what do they use? They use the Jews in order to kinda go through this catharsis. They need the Jewish side to say, Yes, it's not that bad anymore; yes, there's still anti-Semitism, but if we fight together, you're gonna be the good Germans, we're gonna be the good Jews, and everything's gonna be fine. This is like the game we play. And -- the public 28:00game. And as a Jew or as someone who has a Jewish education and a Jewish perspective and position, you have to decide what to do, actually. You can blend in, or you can try to kinda intellectually work through this relationship or go through this question of how is a majority culture that has been -- that has needed and used anti-Semitism as a tool for the last two thousand years -- and I'm not even talking about a tool to kill Jews. I'm talking about a proper, productive structure to construct something like a subject, something we have been used to understand for sexism or racism, but somehow we have not come around reflecting upon for anti-Semitism.

TP: And what did you focus on in your PhD?

MC: It was called "The Antisemitism Dispositive." It's actually written in English. And I was focusing on a -- the notion of continuity and the idea of structure as a discursive structure that constructs subjects. The case study was on early Christian anti-Semitism. So, I actually did a -- my work was on the first three hundred or four hundred years of Christianity and the way the Jew as a discursive entity slowly moves into the center of Christian discourse and Christian self-definition. At a certain point, the Jew has become something like the negative marker for who you are and what time means. Time starts with the killing of Jesus by the Jews, and time will end with the conversion of the Jews 30:00to Christianity. So, I was going through those things. But of course, the motivation was now. 'Cause I was working on, I don't know, two thousand years ago, and all that you think about problems I had perceived now, as problems for my own self. And probably, if you go through -- if you take either side, either go to the private and try to be Jewish only in your privacy, or if you go to the more intellectual, active reworking of whatever anti-Semitism means, it doesn't really mean you're gonna get out of this power relation. You're gonna stay inside of it.

TP: It was about that time when you started to learn Yiddish, was it?

MC: Mm, yes.

TP: How did you get it?

MC: That was still during my studies. During my studies, I had this point when I realized I was not in a Jewish majority space anymore, when I started reconnecting to a more elaborate questioning of whatever my Jewish perspective and my Jewish position and identity could mean. And then, in 2010 it was, I was in Israel for half a year. I was in Israel because I wanted to -- I was actually wondering if Israel could be a place for me. I wanted to check out how this country works, how the people think, how they tick. And I think it was about realizing something like a dream my father had had and something we had learned in Jewish school, that in a way, the logical step would be to move to Israel. 32:00And being in Israel and realizing that that was not really my place, I rediscovered the situation -- or I rediscovered the -- I discovered the chance of being able -- to study Yiddish in the Goldreich Institute. And I was struggling with Hebrew during that time, and for me, as a native German speaker, it was very, very helpful, actually, and very easy, also, to enter the Yiddish space from the Hebrew and the German side. And it helped me to get more used to the Hebrew letters and to have this as a more natural thing, because it always meant some kind of overcoming my inner resistance to start reading Hebrew letters. So, entering Yiddish actually helped me because I knew I'd be able to understand just much more from the Yiddish side. But also to go back to what my 33:00father had done and trying to kinda trace certain lines, which as a child, obviously, I hadn't understood. I only knew the songs, but I didn't know the history. So, I kinda moved into the Yiddish space in order to rediscover those histories.

TP: And generally speaking, what will you say -- what role does Yiddish -- do Yiddish and Hebrew play in your identity today?

MC: Hm.

TP: If at all, any.

MC: No, they do. Very much so. I think -- I'm hesitating because it's not easy to answer. Because I think they do -- they are two things at the same time. They 34:00are the point where my problem begins, and it's the point where my problem starts to be solved. My problem begins with -- or one of my main -- the main things I've been working on for the last years, also in Maxim Gorki Theater, has been the question of how the Jewish subject has been constructed in German public discourse. So, me connecting to a Yiddish and Hebrew tradition makes me more of a Jewish subject than I would have had to be. So, I'm really not choosing the way of being invisible, but I'm kind of actively moving into that space. And if you have a space that is so much attached by fantasies and by projections of whatever has been lost, it's kind of difficult to approach those 35:00places without buying into those fantasies. But then again, I feel like the strategy I've discovered has been to seek autonomy in those spaces in order to rearrange them for myself. So, once I'm able -- once I'm further into a Yiddish tradition than other people are, which happens very quickly because people do not know much about Yiddish tradition. What they know is klezmer and "oy oy oy" and a bit of, like, I don't know, "Tsu mir iz gekumen a kuzine [A cousin came to visit]," like, those songs that have been really popular in Germany for a while. But they don't really know anything about the history. What they know about Jews is that they killed them, basically. So, what they know about Yiddish is that that is the language of the people they killed. So, going into Yiddish as a living language and not as something that has been destroyed allows me to approach the question of Jewish identity in a different way than it is usually 36:00being done in Germany. So, I'd say it's both. It's very central to what I do, and it's -- it's both. It's a problem, and it's part of my solution of how to work through those problematic relations.

TP: So, I believe it's now a part of your professional life, too. And can you describe in two words what you do?

MC: I'm a freelance author. I'm a poet and an essayist. So, I do very different things. I do a lot of readings, a lot of projects. For the last years, I've been working for Maxim Gorki Theater. I've been organizing two events, two main events, together with Sasha Marianna Salzmann, called "Desintegration -- De-Integration Congress]" and "Radical Jewish Culture Days," "Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage," last November. And we have been trying to actually think about the 37:00plurality and diversity of Jewish life in Germany today and the very restricted space of Jewish representation in the public. Like, Jews in public are talking about anti-Semitism, Israel, and Shoah, and that's it. And Jews who live in Germany obviously have a lot more different topics than that. But they have been made invisible. If you're talking about something other than those three things -- anti-Semitism, Shoah, and Israel -- you're basically not a Jew in public. You're someone talking about those things. And we're trying to break this up. We're trying to intervene. We're trying to change the way -- or the positions that have been open for Jews. So yes, that was a very strong focus on those topics. So, the last years it has been a very, very central element of my 38:00professional life. I feel like maybe those things are kinda moving to a first kind of end right now. It has been for three or four years I've been working on this now, and it feels like now, in a way, my work in theater has been the other side of my PhD. I finished my PhD last year, even two years ago, and now I will publish a book on this work in theater and on this Jewish-German relation, and then I feel like maybe I've went full circle. Hopefully. Maybe I'll be able to move into more contemporary Hebrew poetry, into actually translating Yiddish poetry much more than I've been doing that. It was all very conceptual, what I've done.

TP: Okay. And speaking about the projects you're working on in Gorki Theater, as an example, can you describe how the Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage look like?

MC: Um, sure. For the Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage, we decided to focus on art, not on discourse. We had been doing a lot of explaining in the first round, the Desintegration Congress, 2016. We decided not to do any more explaining this time. Because we felt like the act of explaining is already -- already means to kind of prepare or adjust to a German public desire, which actually means to kinda let yourself be pulled back into wherever you want to get away from. So, we kinda decided to focus on art. We had four -- three monologues. We called 'em "Judenmonologe [German: Jewish monologues]." We had one panel discussion, which 40:00sounded like a panel discussion. We announced it as a panel discussion. But it actually was a scripted panel. So, it was actually directed. Because we felt like, Okay, if, as a Jewish minority, you're usually following a script anyway onstage, if it's clear anyway what you're gonna say, why not write down the script? Why not make something more interesting, more theatrical out of it than it usually happens? Because obviously free speaking is not as fun as directed speaking because you are much -- you can just be much more crazy in directed speaking. We did that. As preparation, we founded a fake news channel called Jews News Today, which was spreading fake news -- Jewish fake news, basically. It was making fun of the Russia Today channel, of course, on the one hand. But it was also meant as a kind of advertisement slash rearrangement of reality, 41:00which was really what we were aiming up. We tried to blur the lines between fiction and public and the way the construction of the Jewish subject in Germany is always also, in a way, theatrical. It is always happening in a public space, and the public space, in a way, works like a theater. It's a game of positions and of whatever you say. So, we had those Jews News Today. And they ended on the ninth of November with the Judaization of the Gorki Theater. So, we kind of took over the Gorki Theater as the Jewish world conspiracy, the Wise of Zion; we kind of returned and said, Okay, now it's time for revenge. You killed all of us, we are the last remainders, we got all those different people coming from all over the place, and we have actually occupied all the central positions in German media and government and money, and now we gonna strike. Now we gonna change 42:00this system because theater's boring, the political system is injust, and we're just gonna change it now. So, we kinda started playing with those anti-Semitic stereotypes with the notion of revenge as a difference to the good victim that the Jewish position in Germany usually entails. You're usually the good and moral and nonviolent and non-angry Jewish victim. And that's just making for horrible art. And we tried to kind of open this up and change the way this is being perceived. And also for ourselves, change the way we are thinking about those Jewish sides. We were working with a lot of children of Soviet Jews, of people who had been born in the Soviet Union but then moved to Germany, with Israeli artists, with American artists, with East and West German Jews. So, we 43:00had tried to have a group of artists as diverse as possible to go on this journey, actually. Go on this, like, trip on rediscovering Jewish cultural identity in Germany.

TP: You've been in academics for a while. And how did you start writing poetry out of that?

MC: I think it was a means to communicate with my father, actually. I started writing poetry, seriously, when I was twenty, twenty-one. And that was -- in the first place, it was to connect to my father. He had left me, like, a thousand 44:00poems, and I kinda -- in my first poems I was just taking lines of his and writing my own lines and felt like this was by proximity starting a certain relationship. But also, at the same time I had started to study, and I just noticed that I had a problem of metaphors in scientific writing. I was trying to write too well. Because, as you may be aware, German science is very dry. It's not very fun to read. And if you write stuff that is more figurative, is more metaphorical, it's considered bad science. So, writing poetry was an option or a chance or strategy to differentiate between the two, to have science on the one hand, poetry on the other. But it also meant that my poetry, coming from science, was kinda conceptual. And it still is. I have a -- I think there's 45:00both, right? There's a very subjective approach in poetry does that is telling about yourself, but also there's a very conceptual level of thinking about language as, for example, an archive of histories, of violence, of the things that have been done to people. Which I've been very interested in in the last years, in using German language as an archive and not as an innocent tool, for example.

TP: Is there any poem of yours that you are particularly proud of that you can recite?

MC: Don't know exactly about being proud of, but I think there's a poem that is closely connected to what we talked about in relation to Yiddish language. There's this image of the -- the line is "Ich habe keine lust mehr wenn ich dich 46:00jiddisch sprechen höre eine kerze anzuzünden," which means, "I simply do not want to light a candle any time you're speaking Yiddish." Yes, and I think this really puts it together of what I have been talking about before. I think there's a very strong perception and use of Yiddish as a nostalgic, kitschy history of whatever we have lost. And this "we" is very artificial. Because if a German public, which used to be crazy about klezmer -- now it has become a bit less, but in the '80s and '90s it was crazy -- that was a means for them to reconnect to the Jews they had killed. Which is kind of weird, because in Germany you never had an appreciation for Yiddish culture. Not even in German 47:00Jewry you had an appreciation for Jewish culture, until Buber translated the Hasidic histories and all that, stories and all that. So, you really do a reconstruction of something that has never been a part of German culture. But you're talking about this as if "we" had lost this. We have lost nothing. You haven't even had this before. How can you lose it if you didn't have it? So, I try to, like, with this whole -- and then that means that any time you're talking about Yiddish, it sounds like you're talking about Shoah, which really is doing violence to this language and doing violence to a culture that didn't know about its own destruction until it was destroyed. So, I feel like not lighting a candle and throwing away the violence and the suitcases as the classical images of the Jew from Eastern Europe would be a means or an option to 48:00kinda get away from your own cliché. Because if we're talking about art, there's a real danger of being your own cliché. And -- but then again, being the angry Jew is being your own cliché as well. So, I'm not trying to say that I'm getting away; I'm just trying to say I'm trying to get away. And maybe that's enough. Maybe you don't have to get away. Maybe trying is already something that helps. I don't know. So, there's the poem. I'll just read it. Maybe -- I don't know. I can try to do a translation on the fly, but --

TP: As you wish.

MC: Let's see. I'll do it in German, and then I'll try to translate it. But there's gonna be some Yiddish speakers who hear this, so maybe they're gonna get the essence of it. "dies ist kein konfessionelles gedicht: wie immer, wenn 49:00jemand seine kamera/auf mich richtet, muss ich lachen/wie wenn andere klatschen, klatsche ich auch/wie ich baue einen unterstand aus decken/und sage: hier sind wir sicher/wie ich habe keine lust mehr/wenn ich dich jiddisch sprechen höre/eine kerze anzuzünden/wie manchmal hoffe ich/du durchschaust meine einfachen lügen/wie mein herz ist eine synagogue/wird tag und nacht bewacht/trotzdem brennt es ab/wie ein gedicht, das sagt: bitte gehen sie weiter/es gibt hier nichts für sie zu sehen." So, now I'll do a translation in English. So, "this is confessional poetry: like every time somebody looks at me through his camera/I have to smile/like if others are clapping I'm clapping along/like I built a tent of shelter of blankets/and say: this is our safe 50:00space/I simply do not want/to light a candle/any time I hear you speak Yiddish/like sometimes I hope/you're seeing through my simple lies/like my heart is a synagogue/is being guarded day and night/but is burning down anyway/like a poem that says: please move along/there's nothing here to see for you."

TP: Thank you. You mentioned you probably will be doing more translations. And can you tell something about translations you already made --

MC: Mm.

TP: -- did -- on Yiddish, for example?

MC: Well, a Yiddish poem I translated has been -- was by Sutzkever, "Vi azoy [How]?" -- which is also a poem that Daniel Kahn made a song from, a song I really like. And it's about a lyrical "I" imagining itself after the oppression and after the ghetto and after the destruction. And it imagines itself as a survivor, but a survivor that is not able to get his head away from the destruction. He's finding -- he's using the image of the mole as moving under the new cities and looking for old ruins. And I think Sutzkever's very -- he was a very, very smart, visionary poet. He wrote this poem in, I don't know, '42 or 52:00'43, and he already knew if he'd survive, he'd be digging through rubble the rest of his life. And I think there's something very true about that, if we think about the Yiddish and the Jewish community in Germany today. It's almost like digging through rubble. And that is important on the one hand; on the other, it's really dangerous, because it really closes the question of Jewishness to the present. And something I translated from Hebrew I really liked was from Adi Keissar, a Mizrahi poet, which opens up -- I translated a few of her poems that are more spoken word and very political and very rhythmic. I really like it. And translating this really opened up a way for me to see myself 53:00as an Ashkenazi Jew. I didn't even have this awareness before that my perspective was not only German and not only Jewish but Ashkenazi Jewish, and how this has shaped my fantasy of what Judaism and Jewishness means. And what history it entails. So, translating is a means to inform myself, also. It's a means to bring perspectives to a language and to a space that has been -- and that still is -- very much occupied with a very specific cliché of what Judaism and Jewishness means.

TP: What are the challenges translating from Yiddish into German? They're very 54:00close languages.

MC: Well, there's many false friends. And I think for me, the main challenge -- not if you translate Sutzkever, because Sutzkever is a poet from, like, fifty years ago. But if you think about contemporary Yiddish poetry, it's very hard to translate something from Yiddish poetry that does not sound like Brecht. At least for me. Because Yiddish poetry is not only kinda close to a certain style of German language that is not the style we use right now. It's almost -- it sounds a bit like old-fashioned German, in a way. And it's really hard if something sounds that close not to translate it into this kinda archaic sense. But not to go to this archaic sense means trying to update something that 55:00doesn't sound that way, in a way. It's really difficult. I'm still kinda experimenting with ways to translate that into a language that is diverse and diff-- like, diverse also in itself. That not every single Jewish poem sounds the same, but they kinda -- I start sensing differences in -- among those poems. So, I still need to engage more into whatever has been going on in New York, whatever has been going on, I think, in Buenos Aires; there must be Yiddish poetry there as well. So, I'm still really kinda looking for ways to bring this into a fresh and interesting and contemporary German --

TP: Can you give some examples of some tricky lines that you were struggling with?

MC: I think it'd make more sense to just read a Yiddish poem and then, like -- if you start translating the grammatic structure and the way Yiddish poets use very earthy and rural metaphors very often, talking about the sky and love and animals like that, you'd have a good perception of how the whole space of the images that are used is not the space of the images that are being used now in German poetry. It's just a different one. And if you're using that, it already puts the poem into a certain past of poetic tradition. It's interesting, though, 57:00that if you -- also if you translate from, let's say, Spanish, there's a very -- there's a living tradition of love poetry. But in Germany, there's not. So, if you translate love poetry from Spanish into German, it sounds like old poetry. Just by its topic. I'm exaggerating. It's not that easy. But there is a certain sense of that which in Yiddish I find is being -- people try to counter that by inventing new words, right, in Yiddish? Like "ponem-bukh [Facebook]," like trying to update the language. But that already shows that there's not a -- for example, youth culture, they just produce those words as a new kinda slang, as a 58:00new kind of coolness, that you could then reintroduce into Yiddish as something that is moving along. But you have still a kind of stiffness to the language -- which I feel like, as a poet, I need to bend. I need to kind of weld. Something like that. So, maybe -- I don't know.

TP: We're almost running out of time. So, to the end I wanted to ask some broader questions, like what role do you think poetry in general and your poetry plays in transmitting Jewish culture?

MC: I think there's no general answer to that. I think there's a personal answer to that. And I'd say that for myself, it's a tool of self-awareness and of 59:00almost therapeutical quality. But it's also a tool of interrupting a -- the way we have become used to think about the relation of Yiddish and Hebrew and German and the relation of Jewish people, Jewish group, and the German group, and how we have kind of -- kinda stiffened ourselves into a specific relationship. And I think that poetry, in its basic intent, is trying to shake those relationships up. Poetry's always trying to say, Yes, you see this, but did you see it that way? Yes, you use language, but did you ever think about -- it's this specific dimension of using language. Did you ever think about, I don't know, what it 60:00means if you use German slang words that derive from Yiddish? There's a lot of them, especially in the Berlin dialect.

TP: Can you mention some?

MC: Well, you have something like "Schmiere stehen." "Schmiere" is like a derogatory term. It also means smearing something. "Schmiere zahlen" would be to bribe someone -- "jemanden schmieren." But also it's come -- it derives from "shmirah [Hebrew: guarding]," which is even Hebrew. In Berlin dialect, you have "meine alte Ische -- meine Ische," which is like the -- your wife, basically. Which is coming from "ishah [Hebrew: woman]." You have the, of course, "Mishpoche" or "mishpachah [Hebrew: family]." You have "schmulen, Schmuel" -- like -- ah! "Hals und Beinbruch." That's my favorite. It's like -- "Hals und Beinbruch" means "break a neck" in English. But then, you have "hatzlachah 61:00v'brachah," "hatslokhe," which is like, peace and happiness. No, luck and --

TP: -- blessing.

MC: -- luck and --

M: -- blessing.

MC: -- blessing. And that has been translated to German by a kinda phonetic understanding to "Hals -- hatzlachah -- Hals und Beinbruch." And that is like "break your neck and your leg." Which has no connection to that. But it's very close to a Berlin sense of humor. Which is interesting, how translation also not only means a translation of words but it also means a translation into a context where people have a certain sense of humor, they have a certain sense of history. And every language kind of responds to this. So, if I translate Yiddish now to German, it's different than translating it to German thirty years ago. 62:00And if I do, it's different than if somebody else does it. But that also means a certain responsibility to kind of be sensible to that contemporary situation.

TP: Yeah. Thank you. If there is something you'd like to add or recite or a story you wanted to tell? No? (laughs)

MC: No, I think we're fine. I mean, like --

TP: Then thank you so much.

MC: Thank you.

TP: It's been really interesting. Thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]