Posted on 05/17/2007 3:02:07 PM PDT by Kimmers
I'm not Jewish. Nobody in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else. But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May of 1945 was named Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. I work in Munich, a pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement. Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland) of "The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels." A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanors attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made famous by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my private meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.
It never ceased. Everything just got shuffled to holding companies, trusts and moved to different locations.
Related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1833916/posts
11-nation commission agrees to start transferring Nazi archive to Holocaust researchers
The author's grasp on history is weak. Anti-semitism had been popular in Germany for at least five centuries before Luther came along.
Maybe it's because I have blond hair and my last name is of German origin that the Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of them." It shows how much they understand what it means to be an American.
And that's a great line. Other than Australians, who kind of get it, I don't think anyone outside the US understands what it means to be American.
I posted a link to another article by William Grim not long ago. Everyone who replied basically accused Grim of making up the facts in his story.
I’m sure others will make the points about the long history of antisemitism in Europe, particularly Germany and how this is troubling.
So I’ll make a different point. By banning Nazi words and Nazi symbols even on toys and games about WW2 Germany has asked for a certain segment of kids to be interested by making it forbidden.
Our country is imperfect and it’s tough watching neo-Nazis march through a Jewish Neighborhood or watching Fred Phelps shout terrible things at funeral goers....
But by letting even hateful idiots have free speech its easier for kids to see what idiots they are and less kids want to be like them.
“..reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought to have ceased..”
Why should they have ceased? Humanity hasn’t. Do you really think that WWII changed anything in man’s thinking? We have a generation that was not even born at the time of the Nuerenburg trials. How can they have possibly learned anything from WWII. Zum Wohl!
I grew up in Germany, went to German schools etc until moving back to the US in high school. This guy is exaggerating horribly. Anti-semitism is certainly true of some Germans, and he is right about most of them supporting Palestinians (that is due to the extreme left-wing media that dominates). But one glaring thing he is wrong about is the Turks in Germany. If there is one group of people that Germans dislike far more than Jews, it is the Turks.
Ping
“Other than Australians, who kind of get it, I don’t think anyone outside the US understands what it means to be American.”
Based on my personal experience, Europeans definitely do NOT understand what America is or what it means to be an American. They harbor all sorts of quaint, infantile and dead wrong ideas about the United States and Americans. Heard them a million times.
It was worth a read. Thanks for posting.
Having lived in both Switzerland and France while spending extensive amount of time in the UK - casual anti-semitism is rampant in Europe. Many are cautious about revealing it to foreigners (e.g. Americans) but it’s there.
This is the "Old" German Nazism rearing its ugly head.
The "New" Nazism, or rather the old Older Nazism, features Mohammed instead of Hitler.
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No jew ever hurt me or mine as far as I can tell.
On the other hand my family lost some people fighting the Nazis.
I do not understand it either.
I am a Christian my best friend is a Jew and we consider ourselves sisters.
“I don’t think anyone outside the US understands what it means to be American.”
There are too many “Americans” who don’t understand what it means to be an American.
It’s not about Jews as such, it’s about having someone to blame things on. The Jews are just convenient. For details, consult “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer.
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