On Yom Kippur, last month, I was in Berlin. I am not a religious Jew, but on the High Holy Days I like to be in a synagogue, listen to the ancient lilt of Hebrew prayer and allow my mind to drift from daily cares. It is a form of respite. We all need that these days. Worry has become an early riser.

I closed my eyes. The sounds of Jewish worship in the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue were followed from time to time by instructions or explanations in German. This linguistic alternation, in Berlin, was more freighted than it might be elsewhere. It was an affirmation of healing, but not without a shadowy undertow.

My mind turned to the poet Paul Celan’s phrase, “the thousand darknesses of murderous speech,” and to the complications for a postwar German Jew, or indeed any German, of having a mother tongue that was also the murder tongue. Nothing after the Holocaust is ever straightforward in Germany, not even the jovial smile of the rabbi who conducted the service that day.

Berlin is a city of absences. The stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, are now everywhere; the small brass bricks inlaid in sidewalks that recall a single Jewish life curtailed. What a beautiful name they have! You do stumble. You catch your breath, reminded of the everyday reach of the Nazi dragnet, of what diligence it took to decompose the German-Jewish world.