America has gone through slavery, removing native americans from their homelands, and our fair share of atrocities but the people I consort with feel no direct responsibility. Not in the manner that they had any decision in the matter.
But, I was wondering with the Holocaust so recent (I knew elder people who fought in WW2), What do the German people feel when the subject is brought up?
Subjective I know, but maybe some individuals you’ve known or personal stories about visiting.
When I did a minor in German in university, we had a guest speaker come talk to the Department of European and Soviet studies about this topic. He was a journalist who studied the treatment of the holocaust in school textbooks and curricula.
Long story short? The Western Germans seem to feel great guilt from the acts, and accept their part in the holocaust. The Austrians and the former DDR, however, haven’t been so quick to accept blame, and have attempt to “other” the Nazi regime who committed genocide.
I’d give more specifics, but it’s been a long time since that talk happened. YMMV…
A lot of the neo-Nazis seem to be concentrated in the former DDR (like the terrorists in Thuringia last winter) and Austria has very strong parties with Nazi connections.
From what I’ve heard from Germans I’ve interacted with over the years, they seem to have a lot of guilt codified in their very legal system. Everything from disallowing Nazi symbols to be shown in media, even historical fiction (though obviously it’s okay to use educationally). It’s hard to get a copy of, say, Mein Kampf unless you can prove you’re a historian too.
In addition, I’ve heard a few Germans say things like (and this is a direct quote from one of them) they’re “pussifying an entire nation because of terrible guilt they have about the holocaust.” This was in reference to a topic about Germany’s rather strict laws about violence in video games, and how easy it is to get slapped with a rating that basically makes it legally impossible to sell the game in anything short of a specialist catalog (i.e. they can’t advertise it at all and stores can’t stock it in the open).
Granted this is just the perception of a few Germans I’ve known, but it seems to them that the legal system is assuming that they’re constantly on the precipice of another holocaust, and do everything in their power to scrub anything and everything they think could possibly trigger it happening again (even if it’s hilarious like “having a swastika on a tank in a video game about WWII”).
The East German nazism can probably be attributed to their soaring high unemployment rates and rock bottom economy. I can’t imagine the sort of rhetoric we’d have in North America with 12.5% unemployment, or whatever it’s at in The DDR states these days…
It seems like if one’s grandpa was in the war fighting for the Nazi’s(not that they had a choice), it would be a taboo subject about anytime, which would lead the whole family feeling guilty for something that happened before their time. Maybe a generation or a couple more times removed, they’ll perceive it like the south in America does with slavery, “it was my ancestors instead of it was my dad or grandpa.”
IMHO-
Hence I suppose the video game where you have to use cheat codes to see a swastika festooned train and a picture of Hitler.
I am not an American or a German, but I see the difference in that America’s historical atrocities tended to be profitable for white Americans (and arguably still are, in the case of stolen Native lands), but to my knowledge the German people never experienced even a single short-term benefit from having a Holocaust in their country. So why does Germany feel guiltier?
You can’t sign into a quiet English hotel without someone mentioning the war.
We hosted German exchange students every year at my high school and I had a friend who found it hilarious to run around saying, “Don’t mention the war!!”
(She didn’t do this in front of the Germans thankfully).
WWII is a fading memory…in 10 years, most people who remembered the war will be gone. It will be interesting to see what happens when everyone who had a personal memory of the war is gone.
I suspect that historians will still write about it, but it will be like WWI is today-history of the distant past.
When I was young and traveling through Europe, I visited Bavaria. When I mentioned to my German friends my plans to visit Dachau concentration camp near Munich, they kind-of snickered at me. They asked why I wanted to see that. It was like they were tired of being punished over again for something that happened long before they were born. One of them said they “would like to forget it ever happened”.
“THAT is why I thought it was important for me to see it”, is what I told him, so that none of us would ever forget.
IMHO the Germans should not be punished for what occured in the past, but I do think a gentle reminder about it is in order once in a while, certainly given current social trends, so that it never happens again.
Yet sadly, genocides continue to happen. From the former Yugoslavia to Darfur the tribal nature of humanity still appears to rear its ugly head.
Due to the immigration boom in the early 20th century a large percentage of Americans don’t even have a family connection to that part of the country’s history. On all sides my family wasn’t in this country until the late 1800s on my father’s side and the late aughts on my mother’s side.
Well unlike the Southrons, the Germans haven’t engaged in obssessive whitewashing, nostalgia, apologism, and revisionism of their past. This was worse in the South in the '20s and '30s which is about how far we are removed from World War II.
I don’t think it matters that much whether your personal genetic ancestry was represented in the area at the time; if you live here, you have assumed some inheritance of everything that came before.
I am 49 years old. I am American. My maternal grandparents were German. I was 21 years old before my Grandma told me, in hushed tones, that her brother had fought for the German army in WW2. He fought against the Soviets, was captured with his entire regiment, and was castrated by the Soviets while a prisoner, as were his fellow German soldiers. He survived the war and lived out his life in Germany. I never met him.
My Grandma also told me about either another brother or a first cousin (I was young and impatient and didn’t listen well…, but my Mom says it was a first cousin of Grandma’s) who fought for the Germans and after the war got to Ellis Island.
He got as far as the group medical. The doctor told all the men to take their undershirts off and when he saw the tattoo of a swastika on his upper arm, told my great-uncle/cousin to turn right back around and go back to Germany.
I asked my Grandma (I was paying attention now!) if he had been in the SS and she abruptly ended the conversation - as was her way when she didn’t want to talk about something.
The really odd thing is that I always knew from a very young age that if I really wanted to piss my Mom or Grandparents off, all I had to do was joke about being Jewish. I knew, when I was young, that my Dad’s ancestor’s were German (I know now they were of Danish ancestry, but a part of Denmark that was taken over by Germany). I knew my maternal grandpa’s ancestry was German serfs/farmers back to 1643. But noone ever spoke about my Grandma’s Mom and my Grandma wouldn’t talk about her Mother.
I recently drove my Mom, now 83, out to the farm where she grew up in southwest Minnesota, during the trip I asked her about her maternal Grandma.
She said all she knew about her was her name Amelia Chall (pronounced with that distinctive throat-clearing Kh sound indicative of Yiddish or low-German), that she was from West Prussia, and that her family seems to have disappeared in the early 1940s…
The Waffen SS had their blood type tattooed on their shoulder. Perhaps that is what the physician saw.
Outstanding.
That’s pretty useful and clever actually.