Dear Hitler:
If the word didn’t strangle me, I might thank you for
creating a world that brought forth the legendary power and strength of my
people. You yourself, through your propaganda film department, documented our
ends, but you left it to masters of fiction like Evan Fallenberg to tell our
stories of survival. You have created a universe of pain behind you. It’s not
our deaths we rage against in the generations that follow; it’s the pain of the
last three years, the last five years, the last twelve years, even, in the case
of some of us, the last fifty or sixty years of our lives. You called us
vermin; we looked our torturers in the eye and spat on them as we endured their
blows.
Just ask Teo. Ask him, Herr Hitler, what he did the final
moment of the War, when he escaped his six year slavery as the personal
plaything of an obsessed monster, who rose to be your top Minister of Culture
before this slavemaster was pressed into service as an increasingly overmatched
lieutenant, Captain, Lieutenant General, and finally, escapee. Ask your Baron
Friedrich von Sadistschafft how many boys he demolished on the way to his
enslavement of potentially the best male dancer of his era, possibly even a
rival to Nijinsky. Go to Israel ,
and ask Teo’s friend of his twilight, Vivi, whose life was dissolute, fading,
even, at the age of forty-two, who met your survivor of Reichskutltursschafft
and, fired full of passion, the holy twin of obsession, created legendary installations
in defiance of everything you were and everything you twisted your people into
becoming. Ask their child, conceived on the very last night of Teo’s life, the
eternal tribute to the fact that you were defeated, whereas we were merely
destroyed. From every destruction there are survivors, memories. From your
defeat, a shame that no one nation could bear, not even one Germany .
We, the readers of Evan Fallenberg’s masterful tale, will
feel the passion that Fallenberg nurtures, from the Teo’s first studio, the
parks and balustrades of Warsaw, to the school in Copenhagen where he would
emerge, ready to take over the Reich’s balletic imagination, to Teo’s capture,
enslavement, and violation at the hand of the evil of this culture officer’s
obsession. We will walk the streets of your Berlin with Vivi, the Israeli whose life,
and passion, had fallen out of focus at the hand of another German, who could
not shoulder your burden alone. We will feel the would that seared your city’s
heart for thirty years. We will follow Vivi back to the streets of Tel Aviv
where, through her association and eventual romance with Teo, discovered a
wellspring of passion inside herself and went from coffee-shop waitress and
dilettante to the artist to whom presidents paid obeisance. Finally, I call on
your rotten bones to twist and cry out like the Biblical victims of Dathan and
Abiram, wailing your apologies to the grave while Teo’s and Vivi’s son
Nathaniel, “Given by G!d,” dances in some decades on your metaphoric and real
grave.
We, the survivors, their grandchildren, their neighbors and
the descendants of their neighbors, read the words masterfully imagined by Mr.
Fallenberg, and we give praise for passion, for it is passion that creates true
art.
You can watch Evan Fallenberg read from his novel When We Danced on Water at the PEN
Written on Water festival at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-okE1VVvQI&feature=related.
