So, I can make soap out of your Mother and if I give you a Volkswagen, it will be okay?
What I came to post:
There was a German guy at work, very nice, but I felt very awkward around him.
His first memory was his parents “cooking in a hole in the ground”. I wonder if they were in the bombed ruins of a German city, but I never asked him.
I think she’s referring to people who for example said one person was half-German and half-Jewish without identifying the latter’s nationality. Incidentally the idea of Jews as separate from other people of the country was the idea the Nazis used. Stops Godwinizing
As someone whose extended family included lots of Holocaust survivors and many more who didn’t, I have always been struck by the grudge so many of the former hold against Poles.
I grew up hearing lots of stories along the lines of how, “my sister was betrayed by a Pole for a bag of salt; may he burn in hell”.
Only in the last 20 years or so, have the many examples of Poles who risked everything to save their Jewish friend or neighbour, etc, gotten a lot of air time. Likewise, it’s now more widely appreciated what a huge risk they were taking in doing so. I believe that had these things been as widely publicized and appreciated in, say, 1950 or 1960, my relatives may have changed. But they never seemed to.
Back to the OP, at least in the case of my family, there really was never very much anti-German sentiment (and not nearly so much as there was “anti-anti-semite”). Whatever dislike there was of the ‘Deutschen’ diminished with time - ‘you can’t punish a kid because his father was a murderer’ type of thing.
Well, on one hand my Dad married a woman of german descent. On the other, he will never go to visit Germany, and was definitely disdainful of the idea of me learning German in high school. Of course, he also doesn’t have a large travel budget and was a French teacher. So…take it as you will.
IME whenever I meet Germans, they feel the need to apologize to me for the Holocaust. I explain two things-
#1 ‘I was not born at the time’ is generally a great excuse for not having to apologize for something. The oldest German I’ve had apologize would have been maybe 10 during the Holocaust. IMO, this pretty much absolves him of any responsibility.
#2 I’m German/Austrian on my father’s side. My last name is VERY German. German heritage is great music, great sausage, and the world’s best beer. Dad was a big fan of German folk music and German opera.
Wagner!
I don’t recall if I asked Dad about Wagner’s feelings on racial purity or Hitler’s love of Wagner. I do recall that Dad could not get enough of The Ring.
I consider that hate speech (albeit fairly mild) so have asked for a mod ruling on whether it is or not.
My view is very much forgive and forget.
So you reported it? And, if it is considered “hate speech”, do you suppose there’s a chance that sanctions might be forthcoming? You’ve been here for what, not even two months? There are LOTS of threads about what is considered ‘hate speech’ around here.
ETA: “Forget”? Seriously? The Holocaust?
The Encyclopedia of Nazism describes Wagner as the first Nazi.
He was involved in the revolution of 1948.
One of his favorite conductors at Beyreuth was Jewish.
Whatever.
Der Ring Das Niebelungen is outstanding.
I have no view on whether there should be mod sanctions or not.
Obviously I do not think the holocaust should be forgotten. But neither do I think present day germans should be punished for it either. And they’re certainly not “crypto nazis”.
Hate speech against Germans? It’s not a big secret that not just one but several German companies participated in the pro-German war effort in WWII. I fail to see how this is hate speech any more than saying French make kind of weird cars or English boil their rabbits too much.
FWIW Wagner and all of the German romantics more than earned their keep – it’s a valuable tradition Germans and the dual-monarchy cats kept alive and indeed with which they invigorated European civilization. I wouldn’t want a world without Goethe, von Kleist, Wagner in it. But there’s a price to be paid, and that price is one the German people have been struggling with for quite some time.
That is true. Theodor Adorno (a Jew, FTR, if you didn’t know), in one of his many erudite essays about Wagner recounted an anecdote of Wagner, I suppose at the era somewhat cutting, in our age of complaining about Hollywood moguls, subtly berating this particular conductor. Wagner was not a nice guy, probably – but if one of the most adept cultural critics who happened to be both Jewish and a prominent composer and scholar could find something there’s a bit more there. er, it might be a clue there’s a bit more there.
Run and hide his book on Alban Berg was better and more affectionate!
And you know how much Jews love to get pounds of flesh.
Even if it’s not “hate speech” it’s still a pretty dumb thing to say and reflects poorly on you.
Surely those are the only two relevant identities, given the question? Would the question “Do Christians hold a grudge against Romans?” be unreasonable in any way? Would it be unreasonable to say that you know a Christian who lives in Rome when answering that question, without mentioning that he happens to be German too?
Really?
I don’t think anyone is saying compensation makes it OK, but would it be better if they just did nothing?
I guess I misunderstood when you said, “Forgive and forget”.
No nested quotes, so that was by Bo9zuit about RandRover about his not liking to hear German.
I second this. None of my grandparents (one Jewish one not) spoke German except just to get by, but my former marriage-in-law family spoke German/Yiddish – kind of a mix – and German’s a fantastic language. Flexible, a little bit odd for people from Romance languages – but why on earth would the sound of a good language in which much of the greatest literature (albeit sometimes or often maybe of the oppressors) be so distasteful? That Rand said it makes him sick but I don’t know why. It was good for the Hebrew children (heh) until it wasn’t – lots of good stuff in there. Anyway no serious mathematician or logician or philosopher for most of the twentieth century didn’t know German intimately.
At my Aunt’s by marriage apartment pool, my five year old nephew went up to a woman who was obviously a survivor and asked her, “Why did you write on yourself?”
I just can’t deal with some stuff.
I see what you mean. It’s a stock phrase if you’re not familiar with it.
Perhaps my sentiment could be better expressed as “Forgive, and act as though you have forgotten when interacting with people who never did the relevant thing - but if people (whether they are descendants of the people who did the relevant thing or are not) start doing it or something similar again, then don’t forget the lessons of history”
Actually, I don’t think that was better expressed. Seriously, what would you have me do?
Turn into Hannah Arendt? Heidegger’s lamplightee?
I don’t know exactly what you mean by that but I have read the banality of evil (if I’m right in thinking who Hannah Arendt is). Heidegger I know basically nothing about at all, but luckily for you for reasons that are not very interesting and are certainly not very relevant I usually read a little bit about philosophy every day so I shall read up on him tomorrow and see if that includes stuff about “lamplightee”.