Slow fire

"Every time I see you I think of Dachau, baby." It was not what Susan Neiman expected to hear when she left Harvard in 1982 to spend a year in Berlin finishing her philosophy dissertation. But she soon discovered that history there has a way of intruding into even the most private moments. She stayed six years and wrote a book about something called Vergangenheitsverarbeitung, a word that describes the way Germans confront their past and the Nazis. It was a word that began to haunt Neiman, who is Jewish. Every conversation brought with it an invisible army of ghosts. A lover insisted he couldn't face her without confronting his Nazi parents. A country weekend turned into a quandary when the hostess broke out a bottle of '39 Sauternes, left over from her father's tour of service in occupied France. A rabbi explained the difficulty of sorting out applications to join the Jewish Community in a place where former Nazis may invent Jewish ancestry to mask their own guilt. But by then Neiman had fallen in love with Berlin: its Hinterhofe, where organ-grinders still play for coins thrown from kitchen windows, its Kneipen on every corner, where poets and barmaids drink beer until dawn, and