Germany Unbound
Sixty years is a long time to live with a national shame. For a European country sodden with the pride of accomplishment in the arts and sciences, for a country so proud of its cosmopolitan and cultured outlook on life, how to come to terms with the brutality of its relatively recent past? For many German citizens denial became a handy survival tool, the way in which they could view themselves in a morning mirror, arguing with one's self that the world conspired to beggar the country after the disaster of the Great War (after which there would be no others) in an obvious attempt to defang its militarization, humiliate its citizenry, its beaten government. If that was all there was to it...!The post-war German government took ownership of its country's responsibility in the cataclysm that was the Second World War - at a remove. They were not, after all, their predecessor, the Nazi government that sought to attain the Third Reich's supreme respectability and world supremacy, but their humbled successors whose duty it was to repair a bleeding country and its destabilized existence after war-torn Europe succumbed to peace. While disowning the vicious inhumanity of Hitler & Company, Germans like Willy Brandt did their utmost to bring their country back into the fold of civilized society - and, for the most part, succeeded.
Official Germany shunned all memory of the disastrous Nazi-German government, its focus, orientation, determined pathway to world supremacy. Germany enacted laws to prosecute former Nazis in perpetuity. Laws to ensure that the virus of anti-Semitism could never again be given free rein, nor again reign free. Young Germans, learning the recent history of their country either anguished over the impossibility of ever surmounting the eternal shame, or rebelled against a world that continued to hold it to account for the unspeakable actions undertaken in the name of Germany, with a docile, uncomplaining population content to accept whatever its government decreed.
Germans have elected a woman chancellor. How's that for a turn-around in gender discrimination, where under the-then beloved Feurher, a woman's place was seen to be barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen. Here is a feminist, a scientist, an accomplished linguist, daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She has an approval rating among the German electorate of 80%. Germany has come a long, long way from a country suffering incurable cancer of the spirit and soul to a benign and tolerant country eager and happy to be one among many of Europe's countries.
In their collective eagerness to once again lay claim to group morality, the country makes great effort to display their dismal past of the first half of the 20th century in world history, a horrific history that almost obliterated the glories of German literature, science, music, art and philosophy of which they had been rightfully proud.
As a Jew who as a child was exposed to the dark secrets of the fate of Jews under the Nazis, much about Germany continues to make me uneasy. Spoken German, fairly close to Yiddish (itself mostly derived from an earlier German) brings back frightening thoughts and memories. The thought of transporting myself, even in my imagination, to the country itself where such a diabolical "final solution" was established as a priority to ridding the world of my people, and where, as a result so many Jews were murdered, (few, admittedly, on German soil, but rather in conquered territories) is still unthinkable to me.
Still, to read about Germany today is to draw strength in the belief of mankind's ability to change for the better; singly and collectively. I hold no illusions that a mass transformation is ever possible, that people will suddenly see the light of tolerance and goodwill. But where there is change, there is hope. Even in light of the far-right extremists in eastern Germany exercising their freedom to hate by their ceremonial auto da fe; burning a copy of the diary of Anne Frank.
Incitement to racial hatred will ever be with us. We can and should hope for better, do out utmost to encourage good will toward others.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 11, 2006
<< Home