No-Fly Zone

Up in the Dolomites during the week of Christmas and Chanukkah in 2022, snow shrouding our ski lodge, I settled into a conversation with my good friend Marcel Theroux. A writer for both page and screen and a lifelong student of oppressive regimes, Marcel comes from an American literary clan, was born in Uganda, and lives in London. His wife Hannah, who is originally from Wales, does literary acquisitions for a production company. My wife, daughters and I had lured Marcel, Hannah, and their kids to ski with us, and now we had ruined their vacation.

“Shall we talk about the biographers of Hermann Goering?” I asked Marcel. He knew it was the various painkillers I was taking, the result of a bad accident I had on the slopes just one day earlier, and so he nodded politely.

First a quick word on the accident—actually a double accident. It was Christmas Day and the sun was setting. The last long descent runs from the village of Corvara to the chairlift that connects the village of La Villa and our home base in the Ladin village of Badia. It is not the easiest of runs, with narrow steep sections. But my wife, Karen, and I had done it before, and skiing down I felt the adrenaline rush of knowing that we, parents of two high school-age daughters, folks in our mid-50s, were still out there skiing the famous Sella Ronda. Not boomers!

In retrospect, what happened next could be tied to arrogance and a refusal to ski with proper caution. But I’ve also since learned about the way climate change was affecting the skiing in the region, and a spate of horrible injuries that occurred in the Dolomites and Austrian Alps during the Christmas season of 2022. Vnezapno, as my late maternal grandmother, Anna Mikhailovna, used to say, verrry suddenly the temperature would drrrop so much in the course of several hours that bald patches of sheer ice would form in the middle of perfect snow.

My left foot slid on ice and the ski came off. But I also vaguely remember, as I toppled over, that black cracker bolts on a silver snowboard dashed past me and disappeared into the bend of the narrow slope. Was it him again, Doctor Death from Berlin? First my helmeted head hit the hard ice, and then, after bouncing off, I slammed my right shoulder into the slope, whereupon I experienced the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt, and that includes having hands and arms sutured without anesthesia back in the days of my Soviet childhood. I managed to turn over to my left side and then, my right leg still attached to a ski, I tried to press my back to the mountain so as not to continue rolling downhill. My wife, who was ahead of me and must have heard the crash, stopped and turned around. “I broke something,” I groaned.

I was eventually taken down by ski patrol and driven to a local trauma clinic. A “dislocated fracture of …” sounded so much more beautiful in Italian: “Frattura scomposta del 3° medio della clavicula lato destro.” Dr. Testoni, the orthopedist, told us that in Italy they would probably leave it alone, but in America “they like to operate.” At this point Karen had a call from our daughter Tatiana, that her sister Mira fell on the slopes of Santa Croce, injured her knee, and was now on her way to the clinic. (Three months later Mira had an ACL repair, whereas I, the lucky one, didn’t end up needing a repair.)

At the hotel the following evening we had a meeting of the family council, to which Marcel, Hannah and their kids Sylvie and Enzo were invited as international observers. I had with me a stainless steel flask full of vodka, and I drank sips to dull the clavicular throbbing.

“Does it help?” Hannah asked.

With my left hand, I poured a spot of vodka into a glass and offered it to Hannah.

“Russian Standard,” I explained. “From prewar supply.”

“Are you running out?” Marcel asked. He wasn’t a vodka drinker.

We weighed our options and decided to abort the trip and fly back to Boston early. In the past, when we had discussed going to the Dolomites via Munich, the idea of visiting the memorial site at Dachau had come up.

“I want to go to Dachau,” Mira said.

“What the frick?” Tatiana asked.

Tatiana was becoming annoyed with our family predicament. And she, not her older sister, had been the one who had previously accompanied me on research trips to the former concentration and death camps.

“Now isn’t it ironic,” I said to Mira, disregarding my own pet peeve for the word ironic. “In the past you showed no interest in going with me.”

“Because now I’m interested in Holocaust history,” Mira replied. “I did a paper on Baby Yar.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” I said. “Now I’m not in the mood for Dachau.”

Hanna, Karen, and all the kids left, and Marcel and I sat in room (I propped up on pillows) and finally returned to the subject of Goering.

Why Goering was particularly on my mind had something to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the debate about imposing a no-fly zone, and Germany’s stark opposition. Coincidentally or not, in the Holocaust literature seminar I had recently taught, the students and I had discussed the trajectory of David Irving. A British military historian, author of The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (1973), a polemicist whose book Hitler’s War (1977) already showed symptoms of malignancy even before the publication of its updated, Holocaust-denying edition of 2000. Irving, whose name became known outside the circles of historians after the 2016 film Denial, in which Timothy Spall’s David Irving sues Rachel Weisz’s Deborah Lipstadt for libel and fabulously loses in a London courtroom.

There he was, I said to Marcel Theroux, the post-trial Irving, shunned and dropped by reputable publishers, who continued to publish—self-publish—books about Nazi criminals, hideous books that still sold thousands of copies ... But even more than Irving’s Hitler and Goebbels biographies, I wanted to talk about his Goering book, first published in 1989 and also updated post-trial, in 2010.

Was it remotely possible, I mused, that I, son of Jewish refusenik activists and direct descendant of Litvak Jews murdered in the Shoah, had a soft spot for Hermann Goering? Was it conceivable that, in my heart of hearts I, too, humanized Goering? Goering’s name brought to mind not only his political and war crimes as a career Nazi since 1922 and as arguably the Reich’s second-most powerful man after Hitler. For some loathsome reason I also thought of Goering’s gourmandism, Rabelaisian dimensions, and opioid dependance; an art collector’s plunderous addiction; his sexual dysfunction and völkisch—folk kitsch—sentimentalism; his Germanic econationalism and love of hunting; and, above all, his tangled Jewish problem. Much of this was, no doubt, old fedora to Marcel, but he graciously listened to his injured and slightly inebriated Jewish friend.

Goering’s godfather was Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and entrepreneur, who converted to Catholicism and was elevated to the ranks of nobility. Goering’s father had met Dr. Epenstein while serving as governor-general of German South West Africa. Epenstein would give the Goerings, who were living off a civil servant’s pension, a family home in Berlin-Friedenau. Later he would let them stay at Veldenstein, a small castle in the environs of Nuremberg. Hermann’s mother, Franziska, who came from Bavarian peasantry, was the ex-Jew’s long-term mistress.

Did the adult Goering suffer from racial antisemitism the way some other top Nazis did? I could be wrong, but I doubt it. He liked the double art of flying and painting too much. Here I was exhibiting the symptoms of the same malaise of identifying with one’s subject that most biographers present with. Goering was more of the case of a divided feeling of gratitude to a Jew that, in and of itself, has a way of turning first into unremembrance and ingratitude, and then into loathing the Jew for having slept with his mother.

“Poor Dr. Freud,” I remember saying to Marcel. “Old and displaced to 20 Maresfield Gardens!”

“So you’ve visited the museum?” Marcel perked up.

Goering was also capable of challenging racial anthropology. Take the Erhard Milch investigation. A general field marshal who oversaw the Luftwaffe production and development, Milch was Goering’s second in command until 1944, when he sided with Himmler and Goebbels in an attempt to remove Goering. In 1935 the Gestapo had investigated Milch’s background. Son of Anton Milch, a Jewish pharmacist, a Chekhov fan from Lower Saxony, and Clara Vetter, a non-Jewish woman, Milch would have been considered a person of mixed race of the first degree. As a result of Goering’s interference, Milch was Aryanized. His mother claimed in an affidavit that his biological father was her uncle, a German man rather than a Jew. Aryan incest trumped Jewish matrimony.

“Do you know what Goering said about Milch?” I asked Marcel, who looked positively perplexed.

“What?”

“I decide who is a Jew in the Luftwaffe,” I said as the door opened and my children, as well as Marcel’s, fell into the room, announcing that dinner was served.

And so Marcel and I never finished the conversation about writing a villain’s biography, and I never got to tell him of the creation of the Reich Luftwaffe in 1935, and of Hermann Goering’s bravura that hid the insecurity of a former World War I ace pilot now having trouble fitting inside a cockpit, and the not-yet-Reichsmarschall’s guilty smile of a hunter who shot a doe, and also of the battle on the Volga, when Goering’s star entered its falling parabola—his Luftwaffe having already failed to safeguard the German cities from the Allied bombings, and now breaking his promise to air-supply the German troops frozen in the merciless Russian steppes.

I’ll skip the parting with the Theroux-Griffiths family, in which imperfect Jewish guilt was laced with perfect English noblesse, and also the drive via the Brenner pass and past Innsbruck, where the future Reichsmarschall Goering fled in 1923 after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, underwent leg surgery, and became a morphinist. On the early afternoon of Dec. 28, our 50% injured party arrived in the fine Bavarian city of Munich, still thronging with its Christmas eating, drinking, and shopping. I had trouble putting on my ski jacket, and so I walked the streets of wintry Munich in a shirt and wool cardigan, like a Jewish man who had escaped from his home without having time to dress. Throughout my time in Munich I noticed that people stared at my woven kippa—stared but did not say anything. Which is more or less how I expected it to be: a mix of curiosity and quiet suspicion.

The real trouble began on the day of our trip back to Boston, when we arrived at the Franz Josef Strauss International Airport. We had requested a wheelchair via the Lufthansa website, and we had also purchased seats in such a way that I would sit on the aisle, left of the central four-seat segment—to be able to get up and not get hit on the bad clavicle. The first thing I did in Terminal 2 was to go to a Lufthansa information counter to find out where we could get hold of the requested wheelchairs.

Standing at the counter with his back to me was a skinny bald figure.

“Excuse me, sir,” I asked.

The Lufthansa agent turned to me, her face indignant.

“I’m am not a sir, I am a madam,” she replied, and a cascade of simple puns and palindromes flashed through my head. Madam-Madman, Madam-and-Adam, and so forth.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and started to explain our situation and the injuries.

“You insulted me,” said the Lufthansa agent. “I don’t want to assist you.”

“Why are you giving me such a hard time?” I asked. “I have a broken clavicle. I’m in a ton of pain.” And I traipsed away to where my family members were waiting.

Having regrouped, we proceeded to Counter 15, which was designated for passengers with “limited mobility.” To the right of us there was a separate counter for passengers traveling with young children. Ahead of us in line was an elderly German gentleman in a cerulean blue jacket, exquisitely prim and proper, with a nicely groomed pencil mustache and a very, very old mother who was sitting on a four-wheel walker. She had fine silver curls and the face of an early Christian martyr. Ahead of the elderly German gentleman with a very, very old mother stood a foppish German man with a baby in a stroller, another young child in tow, and three or four massive suitcases. Working behind Counter 15 was a tall and portly man with beringed fingers. He was clad in a tight-fitting Lufthansa tunic and carried the expression of sensual contempt on his fleshy lips and cheeks. If I’m not mistaken, the name of the agent at the counter was Guo R. Ring, and a specialist in Asian diasporas later explained to me that he must have been a German-born son of Chinese immigrants, perhaps originally from Vietnam, now quite assimilated.

The elderly German man was running out of patience because the transaction with the foppish man with the baby, young child, and massive suitcases was taking forever. Finally the elderly German gentleman protested that his mother was very old, she had trouble sitting too long on the stroller, and above all the man with the children was clearly in the wrong line. Lufthansa agent Guo R. Ring came out from behind the counter, positioned himself, his chest and belly about to crush the elderly German gentleman, and said to him very sternly in German that he should “stop talking.”

I peered closer; the resemblance with Reichsmarschall Goering was uncanny, down to facial mannerisms and posture. Then I whispered to the elderly German gentleman that it was pointless to protest and in fact it could make it worse as they could prevent him and his dear mother from boarding the plane. He turned to me and said, in German, and then in English, “I have never seen anything like that in my whole life.” I wasn’t a hundred percent sure as to what he was referring to by “his whole life,” but it sounded formidable.

It was finally our turn to approach the counter. Agent Guo R. Ring took our passports with his night crawler fingers and swiped them through his machine. Then he sized up Mira (knee bandaged) and me (arm in a sling) and asked, in excellent English: “Why do you need a wheelchair?”

“My daughter has a knee injury,” Karen answered.

“I wasn’t asking you,” said Agent Guo R. Ring, vexation in his voice. “I was asking him,” and he jerked his chin in my direction.

“My husband has a broken clavicle,” Karen answered. “He’s in a lot of pain.”

“His injury is upper body, not lower body. Why can’t he walk?”

“I’m a medical doctor,” Karen replied, ready to fight for her family. “And we have a note from the trauma clinic and films of the fracture. Another traveler might bump into my husband, causing pain.”

Agent Guo R. Ring ignored my wife’s words.

“I don’t have seats for you,” he announced. “I’m giving you blank boarding passes. Your seats will be assigned at the gate.”

“This cannot be,” I said. “We paid for seats that we had carefully selected. My daughter and I need to be on the aisle. Why did you give our seats away?”

“I don’t have the patience to explain this to you,” Agent Guo R. Ring said with a rabid slowness, the oxblood stones on his fingers reflecting the metal pipes and glass ceiling of the terminal. I thought of the Reichsmarschall who put on dark rubies on Feb. 2, 1943, when the German troops surrendered at Stalingrad.

“May I have your business card?” I asked.

“You may not. See my associate in charge of mobility, and then to go to the gate,” Agent Guo R. Ring replied. As he was passing our passports to the agent stationed at the counter to his right, I snapped a blurry photo of his chest and name tag—with my left hand, shooting from below.

The other agent’s deeply set hazel eyes were a tiny bit crossed and looked past us into the middle of the earth. He had large ears, a slightly curved nose, wavy reddish hair. The phenotypicist in me (and most ex-Soviets my age and older are keen students of ethnic phenotypes) might have guessed that his parents didn’t come from the same tribe. His demeanor, earnest to the point of being overwrought, signaled a fear of being exposed for something he hadn’t done. I wasn’t able to snap a picture of the agent’s name tag, but I think it was “Bernhard Brauer,” and I remembered it by association with Bernhard Kellerman’s novel The Tunnel, about building an underwater tunnel from New York to Europe, which captured my teenage imagination when I read it in Russian translation in Moscow, in 1984.

At first Agent Bernhard Brauer, whose job was to assign wheelchairs, had trouble locating our booking. He finally found us in the computer.

“Your name is spelled not the German way but the Jewish way,” he uttered with a chortle.

My gut turned, twice. He was referring to the fact that “Shrayer” (as in shtetl screamer) was spelled as a twice-transliterated Jewish last name, first to Russian, then to English. The German way would have been “Schreier,” but I liked ours much better. However, this was not a conversation of two scholars at a Jewish studies colloquium but a Lufthansa agent speaking to a Jewish customer in Munich.

“What—?”

“—don’t say anything,” my daughter whispered in Russian.

She was standing next to me and could tell I was about to lose it. She was right, my wise younger daughter. She understood before I did that the two Lufthansa agents had the power to humiliate us in public. The power not to allow us to board the plane—which, by the way, they came close to doing. And so I held back, Karen also said nothing, and a few minutes later a cheerful lanky fellow arrived with wheelchairs for Mira and me. He proceeded to push both of us to security. As he wheeled us, I told him how horrible Agent Guo R. Ring had been. For some reason I didn’t say anything about Agent Bernhard Brauer and his comment about the “Jewish” spelling of our last name.

“He was recently assigned here,” said the wheelchair operator. “I don’t know him.”

At the gate, after repeated requests, Lufthansa still wouldn’t give us seats. Desperately typing with two fingers of my left hand, I started contacting all the Twitter (as X was still called at the time) accounts associated with Lufthansa and asking them to help me: “Dec 28, 2022, 8:30 AM Hello. I need urgent help. My name is Maxim Shrayer. I am at gate L21 at Munich Airport. I am flying to Boston. I have a broken clavicle. I had an assigned seat, and it was taken away. Now I have no seat. Please help. This is urgent.” One of the Lufthansa Twitter accounts I had contacted shot back a reply right away: “Dec 28, 2022, 8:31 AM Hello Maxim, I am truly sorry to hear, but there is nothing we can do via Social Media! Please talk to our colleagues at the gate, they are responsible for the flight. Nina.”

As I was trading tweets with Nina, I also discovered a reply from another Twitter account: “Are you aware that you addressed the German Airforce?” I replied: “By mistake. But the experience is genuine.” Luftwaffe. Lufthansa. Luftmensch … And then, as it often happens in stressful circumstances, some desperate gears start gyrating in one’s head, forming a chain of absurdly clairvoyant associations. “Luftwaffe,” I was thinking. “It’s the damn Luftwaffe again. First they destroy Guernica, then they bomb the living hell out of Europe. Then, after the Nazi defeat and Goering’s suicide, they slither out of punishment. They aren’t dismantled, they regroup, and soon enough they become a part of NATO’s flying forces. And now the fuckers don’t want to protect Ukraine’s skies!”

As we waited, I googled “Lufthansa and antisemitism” and immediately came upon up the details of the May 4, 2022, flight from Frankfurt to Budapest. About 100 Jewish passengers who had arrived from New York were prevented from boarding their connecting flight to Budapest because of a dispute over wearing masks. In the meantime, our Boston flight was already boarding. I tweeted to Nina, my Lufthansa contact: “I will go to the press with this. You will have a media scandal http://shrayer.com I am not bluffing. You can call the gate and take care of it.” Two minutes later they summoned “the Family Shrayer” to the counter. “Lovely Germany,” read my last text to AltaBadia2, our group chat with Marcel Theroux and Hannah Griffiths. “An agent told me my last name is spelled ‘the Jewish way.’”

I got my aisle seat left of the center segment, and Karen, Tatiana, and Mira had seats across the aisle and to my left. After takeoff I filed a report with the purser, Mr. Mucek, who had the noble head of an ancient Egyptian. He appeared genuinely horrified by my account of what happened, especially the “spelled … the Jewish way” comment from Agent Bernhard Brauer, and promised that Lufthansa would investigate. That was the inglorious end of Lufthansa flight 424 Munich-Boston.

At home in Boston I had trouble sleeping and even more trouble physically pulling myself out of bed. In the middle of the night I did some more research on “Lufthansa and antisemitism” to learn that an out-of-court settlement was reached in October, with a payment to each passenger who had been prevented from flying to Budapest. I also learned that Lufthansa had recently adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism and announced “new steps to combat antisemitism.”

The next morning I composed a letter by using dictation, which took me over an hour. My letter summed up the incident with Agent Guo R. Ring and Agent Bernhard Brauer at the Munich airport (without drawing out the parallels with the top Nazi Luftwaffe commanders Goering and Milch). I sent it via all the available online and email channels that I was able to locate. And I even emailed the letter to Mr. Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, and Mr. Keyser, another senior executive with Lufthansa. I didn’t send it to the German Air Force, although maybe I should have.

In the spirit of verity, I will quote excerpts from my letter, in which there was, perhaps, an excessive pathos of Jewish weltschmertz, but the fundamental sentiment was absolutely true:

Dear Mr. Spohr,

My name is Prof. Dr. Maxim D. Shrayer. I write regarding a very traumatic and humiliating experience I had on 28 December 2022. […] This was a form of antisemitic aggression. […] I felt deeply insulted and humiliated, especially because I was at the mercy of these two horrible human beings. […] I am shocked that something of this sort happened at Lufthansa and in Germany, of all places.

I submitted the letter on New Year’s Eve and didn’t hear back for several days. Finally, on Jan. 6, 2023, I received a long email from Mr. Markette, head of customer relations for the Americas and Ms. Wills, complaint resolution official, both of Lufthansa:

Dear Prof. Dr. Shrayer

We are in receipt of your correspondence to Customer Relations and to our Management Board concerning your recent experience in Munich on December 28, 2022. […]

The reported incident that occurred in Munich does not reflect Lufthansa’s values and its respect for all our customers. Lufthansa is a multinational company whose customers are citizens of the many countries that we serve; we embrace diversity. Lufthansa has a no-tolerance policy for any form of disrespectful or discriminatory actions so your report is certainly distressing […].

After a conference call with Mr. Markette (who did most of the talking) and Ms. Wills (who played the role of a silent witness), I received this follow-up email from Luftwaffe:

Dear Prof. Dr. Shrayer,

Please accept our renewed apologies for your regrettable experience. We attach the utmost importance to our staff treating each of our customers in a polite and professional manner and we regret that your encounter with the agents may have been below our customary standards. […]

As we completely understand the situation from your perspective, and have taken all the circumstances into consideration, we would like to offer you and your family a total compensation of […], covering all the concerns you have raised.

If you are in accord with this arrangement, as soon as we receive the bank details requested below, we will make the payment without further delay. […]

It is our hope you will view this event as an isolated incident and we look forward to serving you and your family in the future under more pleasant circumstances.

The modest yet not negligible sum they offered would have been enough to cover four new roundtrip tickets from Boston to a major European hub and to pay for our family’s stay at a decent hotel.

Would taking the compensation amount to forgiving the insults? I kept thinking. And what about the disgust I now felt? Would it translate into never wanting to fly with Lufthansa again? But how to travel to Europe and in Europe and avoid the aerial ways of Lufthansa?

Soon after the funds were wired to our bank account, we booked a Christmastime trip to Israel—flying nonstop from Boston to Tel Aviv.

When I decided to commit this story to memory, I messengered my friend Marcel Theroux: “A serious question: May I identify you all by real names in the ski piece I’m writing?” He immediately wrote back: “Yes—everyone is okay with this x.”

When I was almost done writing this story, Marcel and I talked on WhatsApp.

“I still have ethical misgivings about accepting the compensation from Lufthansa,” I told Marcel.

“But isn’t it better to get it than not?” he asked.

I agreed as we gently broached the subject of another European reunion. But where?

A no-fly zone of my own has been formed over Europe’s skies, and I, frequent visitor to Europe that I am, have yet to figure how to enforce it.