Motorbikes, Bicycles, Jews Poem by gershon hepner

MOTORBIKES, BICYCLES AND CATTLE-CARS: THE BICYCLE RIDERS AND THE JEWS



Gleefully unladylike,
straddled on a motorbike,
she’s the icon of all bikers,
implying: I am on the saddle.
If you hate the way I straddle,
go away and join the hikers.

How you sit on what you drive
defines the way you stay alive.
If your vehicle’s a bike
make sure your head is well protected
by a helmet, unaffected
by ground when it goes there on strike.

Noblesse besieged, made proletarian,
Jews, although they are not Aryan,
rode their motorbikes and cycles,
until of all their wheels deprived,
when but few of them survived,
cattle-carred to end life cycles.

Adam Kirsch reviews “The Silence of Hammerstein: A German Story, ” by Hans Magnus Enzenberger, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers (“Can We Judge General von Hammerstein? ” NYR,6/10/10) :

Even a reader with some knowledge of the history of modern Germany might well draw a blank at the name of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, the man at the center of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s unusual and fascinating new book. From 1930 to 1934, Hammerstein was Chief of Army Command, the highest-ranking officer in the Reichswehr, as Germany’s army was known under the Weimar Republic. He was also an undisguised opponent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Yet he does not figure in the military or political history of the period nearly as prominently as some other generals—like Kurt von Schleicher, Hammerstein’s friend and political ally, who was the last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler, and was killed during Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Nor, on the other hand, does Hammerstein share in the honor due to the July 20,1944, conspirators, whose plot to assassinate Hitler came close to success. Hammerstein was involved in the long-brewing conspiracy: one of the many documents reproduced by Enzensberger is a memo delivered to Martin Bormann a few days after the failed coup, which noted that some of the leading conspirators met at Hammerstein’s home in 1942. But by the time those plotters—again, a largely aristocratic group of officers, including Henning von Tresckow and Claus von Stauffenberg—brought themselves to act, Hammerstein had been dead for more than a year. Remarkably, for a man with such powerful enemies, he died of natural causes. At his funeral, his family declined the usual military honors, because they refused to allow the swastika flag to be draped on his coffin.
If Hammerstein played a comparatively small historical role, why did Enzensberger—Germany’s leading poet and man of letters, now eighty years old—think him deserving of a book? The reason, he writes, is that Hammerstein’s life “says a great deal about how one could survive Hitler’s rule without capitulating to it.” The quality that made this possible comes across more clearly in the book’s original German title—Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn—than in the English translation by Martin Chalmers, The Silences of Hammerstein. Eigensinncan be translated as stubbornness or obstinacy, but in this case it carries a more positive connotation than those words usually do. The book’s French title, Hammerstein ou l’intransigeance, seems to come closer to Enzensberger’s meaning…
From 1930 to 1934 Kurt von Hammerstein was Chief of Army command, the highest rank in the Reichswehr. He was an undisguised opponent of Hitler and the Nazis, and refused to join his father-in-law Baron Walther von Lüttwitz in the attempted putsch in March 1920. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Hindenburg not to appoint Hitler. Hindenburg told him he had no intention of doing so, but did so two or three days later. Hammerstein was given command of the Polish front in the invasion of Poland on September 10,1939, but was sent back to retirement on September 21. He had four daughters. Three is a photo of one, Maria Theresa, straddling a motorbike, gleefully unladylike, careening into the future. His daughters had predilections for Jewish friends. Maria Theresa’s sister fell in love with Werner Scholem, Gershom’s brother, who died in Buchenwald in 1940, having been sent there as both communist and Jew. Maria Theresa married a half-Jew and lived for a short time in a kibbutz near Tel-Aviv before moving to Japan until the end of the war.

7/6/10 #9074