For how long are Germans supposed to feel a personal guilt about what happened in WW2? Don't take me wrong. I know what happened and it is terrible and should not be forgotten or even worse denied. But is it realistic to expect that attitudes of young people whose grand parents were probably children during those days will not change with the times? We Americans don't feel a personal guilt about mass killing of the indigenous population or slavery. We acknowledge these were atrocities but relate to these as to other terrible things throughout the history. Do Catholics feel personal guilt for the crimes of the Inquisition?
49
@Gabi if you think there's no personal guilt about the mass killing of indigenous people in America maybe that's because you don't live in Indian country like I do. It's a daily topic here, as it should be.
41
I was a foreign exchange student in the US in the 90s. Growing up in Germany I was informed about that part of our history, beyond historic facts we were made to think how we may have acted, what it would have taken to withstand or how easy it can be to follow the wrong people. Not taking a moral high road but acknowledging that human rights & democracy are something to defend, work, fight for as they are easier lost than one can imagine. Since at that time there also was a rise of neo nazis, we were scared and well aware of the serious topic. Of course it was painful at times.
They prepared me well:
Week 1 in high school in the US I was asked why I hated Jews as „every German does that“. I was horrified. The same person joked 2 minutes later that he wasn’t judging as he thought killing all native Americans in the past would have been a good idea, another student commented that her grandmother told her not to befriend me as she had lived through the blitz in the UK during WW II and would not tolerate that anyone in her family would become friends with a German.
That was when I learned that Germany may have been the site and source of one of the worst disasters but our obligation, is not to feel guilty for something we personally were not present for and can’t undo, but to ensure that nobody has excuses to repeat, trivialise, copy, forget, ridicule, or glorify this at any scale anywhere.
In the years since I sadly had multiple opportunities to fulfil exactly that obligation.
9
Mistake No 1 was attributing the horrors of Nazism to a shadowy group known as the Nazis, as if it was a shadow, infiltrating entity separate from German society. The harsh truth is the Nazis were mainstream. Once Hitler came to power they became normalised in German society and 90%+ of the population acquiesced, whether passively or actively, to their ideology and methods. The intolerance and hate of Nazism is no different to what is bottled up in all societies. It is a core part of the darkness in human nature. Until we truly internalise this in ourselves, accept it and remain vigilant of it, societies will be doomed to rhyme with the past.
69
Still, for all that, the Germans are still way ahead of the US as far as coming to terms with the past goes. How many Americans think seriously today about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what it implies for our sense of nationhood? The history of 250 years of enforced servitude on the part of the ancestors of a large portion of the population (and then officially sanctioned discrimination for another 100+ years)? The Germans have (with obvious exceptions) largely taken responsibility for their past--in the schools, in public debate, even in the "stumble stones" of their cities. Have we?
236
@Jim Muncy
The article states that Jews are being harassed on the streets of Germany. That is exactly what happened before six million Jews were gassed to death.
What part of that is a game to you ?
My male cousins were locked in a Synagogue that was set on fire by the Germans, as their wives,
mothers, daughters and sisters were forced to listen the screams of their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, uncles and grandfathers were being burned alive.
Does sound like a game to you?
My brothers-in-law and sister-in -law and a number of my friends are the children of concentration came survivors. Their parents had previous spouses and children who been slaughtered by the Nazis. These children spent their childhoods listening to their parents screams in the middle of the night. The few surviving parents continue to have nightmares.
I have heard the first person accounts from survivors, of their having been dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, herded onto cattle cars, and of their arrival in Aushwitz, and of their parents being murdered before their eyes.
I know twins who were Mengele's subjects.
What part of the rise of anti-semitism in Germany is a "game "to you ?
It may be a game to you It's no game to those who are being harassed on the streets of Germany for being Jewish, just as it wasn't a game in the 1930s , at least not to the Jews. The Germans thought it was very amusing, indeed, and filmed much of their "game ".
52
@Al from PA, Americans don't have to think seriously today about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We won a difficult World War on two fronts and we shouldn't have apologize for it.
17
The winners, not losers, of wars write the history.
13
In 2017 I was invited back to Dresden, the city where I was born, and I went with my 15 year old granddaughter because I wanted her to see a part of her family's history. The city government had prepared a comprehensive look at the past of our small group. We stayed on an extra day, the day an AfD demonstration took place in a square near our hotel and, out of curiousity, we went to it. As the swastika is prohibited, the flags surrounding the speaker's stand were those of the state of Saxony. Standing near us was a group of about 20 high school students. At one side of the square was a roped- off area containing hundreds of people. Every time the AfD speakers shouted into the loudspeakers, the high school students booed and the people in the roped off area pulled out whistles and blew them to drown out the speakers. Two days later the NYT published a story and photo of the weekly rally with no mention whatsoever of the the students or the whistle blowers. Even though I was only 1-1/2 years old when my parents and I left Dresden, I was terrified by the
AfD speakers but heartened by the presence of the students, the police (many), the whistle blowers, and the warm intentions of the city government that had invited me. Who will be the Germany of the 21st century, the AfD or the people with the whistles?
170
@GSK, an excellent post. I was living in Europe when Charlottesville nazi protest led to the taking on innocent life. Most of the European press took liberties to describe an America on the verge of a total nazi takeover. The fact is that most of us think and write in terms of other countries with crayon-like simplicity. I now teach a comparative policy course where my students often write quick short papers on how easily they would solve the world's most difficult problems. I always tell them, now put your answer in the context of your city. Would the policy proposal you advocate work in your hometown...oh no, they always answer, its a lot more complicated. We need to understand that what is going on in Germany / Europe is not that different than here or in any of the old wealthy democracies that are trying to democratically reach a consensus on issues (notably immigration) that have no easy answers.
24
@GSK A few years ago I was in Munich, and paused to see a PEGIDA demonstration/presentation in the Marienplatz (PEGIDA is sort of the forerunner of AfD). Next to them, a Klezmer band set up and played lively tunes from Fiddler on the Roof, drowning out and distracting the crowd. I thought it was a great response.
48
@GSK Let's hope it's the people with the whistles. Thanks for sharing.
9
While Germany remains heads and hearts above the rest of the world in coming to terms with its past, that work will always be finite and unfinished business because its root cause is the worst part of human nature. 'Never again' has become 'Never again and again and again and again.' Sadly, each time it's mentioned that phrase loses a bit more of its agency and therefore becomes, as Hannah Arendt so aptly described it, 'The banality of evil.'
That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to try because we all still have everything to lose if we don't.
20
What's the big deal? "Some people did something" in Germany in the 1940s.
7
Germany killed its 1935 Nobel Peace Prize Winner during an exponential expansion of its military. Chinese just killed their Nobel Peace Prize Winner while exponentially expanding their military and spy network. Has the world forgotten?
6
From a quote in the article:
"..what is not allowed cannot happen.."
LOL, that settles it then!
The fact is while the fascist Germany was not a place I would want to live, their great downside was not their politics, attitudes, nationalism, self absorption, or cultural delusion. They held the 1936 Olympics and nations went there and Hitler was master of ceremonies, no apparent problem, hardly a pariah.
The problem that made the shoe drop was their MILITARISM not their ugly values. Had the Germans not used military might to advance their project, they would have been an obnoxious, paternal, narrow-minded and eventually rich nation that other countries could do business with, some would like and others loath. Kinda like a white utopian Saudi Arabia with income based on engineering instead of oil.
It's very popular to skip the realities of history so you can make believe what you learned the hard way you always knew anyway, that your moral victory was intentional. But consider a simple conjecture as example, one that at the time was believed: reflect on a Europe that after the Munich agreement the Germans kept their word to Chamberlain, and took no military action against another nation. In that case England, France, and the USSR would have carried on vast economic deals with Germany, and ignored her internal affairs. That is to say; it was German militarism, not German racism or crazed white superiority social theories, that both caused the demise of relations and so now allows the West to presume today it's always had a moral upper hand.
3
"In my neighborhood in Berlin, and others across the country, people wearing Jewish headgear are harassed on the street. "
You can judge the whole article by the implication versus the reality of who is doing the harassing. It's not the AfD. The AfD has strong Jewish membership last I heard. And that "Jew" is again a common curse on Germany's school yards has also nothing to do with AfD kids. By the way, the whole idea to quench authoritarian tendencies by more "moral reckoning" is just a little daft. That's like telling ISIS activists about more reasonable and historically accurate moderate Islamic views.
This shouldn't be a surprise, the things feeding this surge in anti semitism, xenophobia and so forth is not something unique to Germany. I am sorry to hear that there are people in Germany who think things like Germany was the victim in World War II, but it doesn't surprise me, it doesn't take long for memories to fail, and then suddenly we will see people in Germany clammoring that the 'other side' be taught in school (does anyone doubt that a German version of Fox News wouldn't be putting a positive spin on Nazi Germany?).
Just think of the US, where the right wing complains about history that talks about the faults of the US, where the religious right and the GOP proclaim routinely that the US could do no wrong, that we were 'blessed by God', or that we have history being taught that dismisses slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War and promotes the idea it was fought over ideals,and that slavery "wasn't too bad" (Yes, Texas, your curricula, among others). It is an attempt to sanitize the past to justify such behavior in the here and now, and it knows no country, it is much like the myth that something like Nazi Germany "couldn't happen here", when history proves it could, if not in the same form, with the same root causes and yes, with unthinkable outcomes.
1
So, Millions of Germans see no reason to associate themselves
with the Third Reich ....... even as a cautionary reminder.
Italy has now gone Far Right Wing in its Political Leadership ......
Poland has now gone Far Right Wing ......
Hungary has now gone .......
Ukraine has now ......
Gosh, Sparky, what could *possibly go *WRONG ..... ?? ;-D ;-D
1
As a German and antifascist I just want to ask a simple question: Did the demonstrators in Charlottesville or the members of the KKK forgotten the Lessons of the Nazis? Since the rise of fascism has become a worldwide phenomenon is it in my opinion too easy only to fcous on Germany. Just my 2 cent.
9
Here, we need to worry about the Dems. They've gone completely radical. The Left's antisemitism, once restricted to college campuses, has now become a much more mainstream Dem (e.g. Ilhan Omar, Rhasida Tlaib, etc.) position.
There's no question, the world has caught the nationalist flu. That always-smoldering peat fire of race paranoia is most worrisome to me, and not just in Germany, either.
I can only hope that no more lives will be sacrificed on that altar.
I don't think anybody of sound mind would hold a whole generation and more of blameless people accountable for the Nazi horrors. It's like stigmatizing innocent family members for a murderer in that family.
But Trump and his lunatic fringe have been seeding and fertilizing that right-wing style internationally, and young whilte males are aboard with their logos and tattoos and music and half-baked, misspelled pseudo-manifestos.
Trumpism gives them a chance to dress up and shout themselves hoarse and burn decorative garden torches.
They're augmented by cognitively eccentric elders. In this country it's MAGA hats and Trump swag at those idiotic ralllies. I can see Germany's version of it on the rise too. Ick.
5
Germany should be the LAST place to find National Socialism/Fascism these days. I guess the "new" German right either has no conscience, no sense of history or to morals to let it gain any traction. Here in the U.S., with Constitutional freedom of speech and assembly, we open the gates of hell in order to defend the rights of good people to speak their minds. I cannot sanction censorship for it opens Pandora's Box of oppression, but we're getting close with Fox and NewsMax.
"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it". There will be no Nazi activity on this earth, ever again, if it is within my power to prevent it. The same goes for other flavors of ultra-nationalism that seeks violent conflict and human abuse.
3
" Forty percent of Germans say it’s right to blame Jews for Israel’s policies in the Middle East"
I'd argue "Israel's policies in the Middle East" are what they are because the Jews collectively figured what you are reporting in Germany was bound to happen all over again ... in Germany, in the rest of Europe, and certainly after seeing what "land for peace" and "taking risks for peace" (as lectured to Israelis by no end of pundits with no skin in the game such as the NY Times stable of columnists) in Gaza, in southern Lebanon and in the non-stopping antisemitic incitement by the PA who rejected every generous peace proposal giving them a state even including re-partition of Jerusalem -- only to be answered by more PA-sponsored hate and intifadas costing a 1000 Israeli lives.
The other irony of course is that the Germans bleed so much for the Palestinians in their conflict with the Jewish state (wonder how much they'd bleed if the Palestinians were in conflict with any other nation other than the Jewish one?), but see how the Germans would react if their "cherished" Palestinians -- virtually all Muslim -- began to migrate en mass to Germany. Then we'd hear a new story, no doubt.
1
The current top Reader Pick says, "Well, the obvious question is, has America forgotten the history of Germany? Seems like our current situation is an eerie repetition of events almost a century ago."
I can't help but wonder if the author and those who recommend the comment are themselves at all aware of German and American history. There simply is no similarity between German and American history. Germany post World War I was an economic wasteland. The U.S. is not. Nazi Germany made the annihilation of massive groups of people (e.g. Jews, Roma, gays, etc.) an end in itself, not a means. The U.S. at its worst removed, enslaved, and killed people for economic reasons, a means to an end. Germany did not become a country until 1871, after a semi-imperialist conquest by Prussia. The U.S. was formed a century earlier by the voluntary coming together of independent British colonies. One could go on......
So others may see it, I am reposting here Blackmamba's comment for perspective:
"The Holocaust was not perpetrated in America by Americans against other Americans. The Holocaust was not perpetrated in Europe by Arab, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish Muslims. The Japanese Empire did not kill 30 million Chinese because they were Jewish. The Japanese Empire did not invade Southeast Asia and the Indo-Malaya and the South Pacific because of Jews. Nazi Germany did not kill 27.5 million Soviet citizens because they were Jewish. Only one holocaust is the Holocaust. Not Rwanda nor Darfur."
4
If Germany did not do enough to eradicate Nazism after the war then who is to blame? The Allies who occupied and partioned Germany for 4 years after 1945 or the Germans? What is happening now in Germany is happening all over Europe and the USA. Look at our president and tell me we are not encouraging and condoning white / ethno nationalism? Did Trump tweet about the massacre in NZ? Did he not say there were "fine people on both sides".. the NYTimes should examine the role it and other newpapers played in Trump's election as well as the nonstop coverage it gives him whenever he breathes...
5
Harsh as it may sound, it far less so than seeing my people being exterminated by the millions: it's never too late to disband this country and annex its pieces to its neighbors, forever. Enough is enough!
2
@AH
Just to clarify: you ask for disbandment of Germany?
I assume this is a thought of revenge as it clearly cannot be an attempt to eradicate antisemitism. If it was the latter- antisemitism is not a German invention or limited to its borders. So you would not get anything out of it but revenge.
Anyone who uses the word Nazism simplifies the complicated issue of social dynamics to an issue of black and white.
There are racists, there are nationalists, there is loss of identity coherence and the feeling of being left behind by the elites. And of course there is plain stupidity - on both sides.
The populists lie, the liberal make promises they don't keep, this is not about good and evil, this is just self-enforcing clientilism.
So what are the lessons of the nazis ? The populists don't just pop up out of nothing, they got a fertile ground to agitate and grow. But they real culprit are those elites, who let this happen, who can not derail the hate and wrath.
And the germans are by far not the only one to deal with fascism, Brexit, Trump, Italy, Poland, Hungary, all nations are dealing with this. And the intellectual elites just can gripe about this, but they fail to counter this, they are the one who have learned nothing.
2
Perhaps you all aren't familiar with the German movie entitled "Er Ist Wieder Da", in English, 'Look Who's Back'. Who being Adolph Hitler. Everything the author says is pretty much summed up in the film. The more you know about the history of the Nazizeit the funnier it is. The director even pokes fun at the popularity of Hitler in Ukraine during the Maidan coup and the fact that Hitler was very popular with Arab nations that wanted to see the destruction of the Jews.
It's on Netflix.
4
A more important question is whether Fat Donald Trump has forgotten the lessons of the Nazis? Concerning the Muslims in America, are his actions and his rhetoric any different from those of Adolf Hitler as he began his rise to power in the 1930s?
1
Hockenos is not a German. He is a German correspondent of the Times. It is certainly the case that many correspondents do not understand the actual interests and character of the German people. It appears that this is the case with Hockenos. It's especially telling that he is whining about "xenophobia" and "protests" over the unvetted, unchecked inclusion of more than 1 million Muslim invaders in 2015-2016. That has led to well-known issues - increases in anti-semitism, gang molestation of women, Germans being evicted from their apartments to house illegals, etc. The rise of AfD is DIRECTLY and CAUSALLY related to that Merkel Mistake.
4
'Has Germany Forgotten the Lessons of the Nazis?'
We ( US citizens) sure seem to have!
2
"In my neighborhood in Berlin, and others across the country, people wearing Jewish headgear are harassed on the street."
Could these anti-Semites be the recent Muslim refugees?
1
opposition to immigration is not the same as being a Nazi.. these garbage generalizations are turning into self-fullfilling prophecy. make enough positions "Nazi" and you end up making good people who disagree with you into enemies.
3
Take a look at Hannah Arendt:“The Origins of Totalitarianism” and count the parallels between the rise of Fascism in Germany under Goebbels & Hitler and today with Trump & the GOP.
2
What are the lessons to be learned? Hannah Arendt documented them in several books. In the USA the propaganda and rabble rousing skills displayed by Goebbels and Hitler have indeed been learned and put to use. Once more a gaggle of billionaire despots has usurped our government, rendered Congress incapable due to Senate blockage of all reform, and elevated a marionette rabble rouser to eminence, not to praise democracy but to bury if.
3
Gee, Europeans are anti-semites. Who would believe it? Honestly, I can't believe anyone would think differently. Two thousand years of "The Church" should mean something and even those who profess not to believe in god have the hatred of Jews in their DNA. What a surprise.
2
The new alt right in Germany is coming largely from the former East Germany. East Germans are used to autocrats, and it's not uncommon to hear talk like "we need a Trump here" in the streets.
2
Riverbanks in Europe still bear the bones of the victims of the Huns. Atrocity is a human thing.
If economic problems are not solved, overpopulation continues and resources become scarce, the four horsemen will saddle up.
The writer mentions the former East Germany. Angela Merkel hails from that part of the country. It is where right wing anti- Muslim, anti-Semitic extremism burns hottest. It is inconceivable to me why she did not have the foresight to see how admitting a million or so Syrian refugees into an unwilling Germany would destabilize the country. Her goals were laudable but the country was not ready. The shadowy sceptre of Naziism never fully retreated after WWII, I remember encountering it in Austria fifteen years ago. Merkel should have known better than to stoke the fires. A lot of what we see in Germany today is due to her policy of too many immigrants too soon.
2
This isn't shocking or even surprising. Our American Civil War ended almost 160 years ago, yet racism remains a strong and virulent force here. Our Civil Rights movement could perhaps be likened to the German "reckoning" referenced here -- a beginning, but far from complete. Elements of both the German and American cultures continue to promulgate hatred of the other, however "other" may be defined. We who live in glass houses should not be tossing stones.
6
The cultural and moral costs of reunification were totally underestimated. West Germans bought the idea that all Germans were “one people” but they weren’t really anymore, and the unresolved issues of residual Nazismus from, particularly, some East German men ended up degrading the overall cultural and moral underpinnings of the German West rather than being elevated by them. I have come to understand that every nation/community has to actively deal with this hateful element all the time. We did indeed become complacent, all over the West, when we thought winning the Cold War was the end of history.
71
@Suzanne
Have WE forgotten the lesson of the Nazis?
9
"And in the aftermath of the refugee crisis of 2015-16, many Germans — including mainstream, middle-class citizens — embraced the far right’s premises. "
Legacies of failed Obama foreign policy and Merkel failed domestic policy.
8
@scythians,
What failed foreign policy of the Obama administration and what failed domestic policy of Angela Merkel ? His nuclear treaty with Iran and her welcome of Middle Eastern refugees ? The US kept the Soviets from mutually assured destruction by a series of testing and non proliferation treaties after the start of the Cold War. Obama called for the end of hostilities with Cuba and a pact with Iran both of which have been nullified by the present administration. Talking is so much better than threats. Eastern Germany is home to more older people than the West, more unemployment, less prosperity and the expectation of a better future. Now shadowed by a return to attitudes all the nations of Europe and the western democracies thought were remnants of a bitter past. I was born at the start of WW2 and I am sorely saddened by current events but loath to blame any specific person for the malignant policies that threaten all of us today.
9
My family lived in Germany during the postwar occupation. As a child I had many German friends and with German nannies, it was a second language. Many Germans after the war were angry and resentful, firstly because they lost and secondly because the allies' denazification program was a burden since so many had been Nazis.
Lip service was paid to allies demands for acknowledgement of war crimes. It wasn't until Anna Rosmus's documentation of her home town's Nazi involvement and the telling of other like histories that Germans of her generation really appreciated what their parents and grandparents had done.
In the East, former Gestapo officials readily found employment in the new Stasi of the GDR while the state touted its dedication to 'real' democracy. As in the soviet republics, the Soviets simply stifled nationalism rather than really dealing with the problem.
It's an ongoing process. In comparison, Japan never really accepted its responsibility for the war or its war crimes and certainly didn't include any national accountability for the war in it's educational curriculum.
10
I happen to be in Germany at this moment and it's tough to dismiss Mr. Hockenos's concern. Institutional memory fades over time, especially the horrors wreaked by human politics mutation into bloody butchery. Who any longer, for example, wrings their hands over the mass terror of Genghis Khan?
This is hardly a German issue alone. Nazism wove its atrocious impact across a wide swath if non-German territory where citizens gladly joined in the bloodbath. Parts of Mr. Hockenos's article read like a description of today's America. Nazism lurks darkly beneath the surface of the human condition. It takes constant, collective vigilance to hold it at-bay.
11
"With the World War II generation mostly gone, the school lessons on the Holocaust and Nazism are taught secondhand, the tone often pedantic and their rituals rote."
All history is "secondhand" by definition -- if there are no living witnesses, history must be told with documents, recordings, photographs, artifacts, etc. as evidence for what happened in the past. And Hockenos completely overlooks the importance of archaeology as a way to collect evidence for what happened in the past.
Hockenos seems to be fallaciously arguing that without living witnesses, history cannot be authentic.
And history education can be interesting and illuminating or "pedantic" and "ritualistic". Would Hockenos make the same criticism about how Greek or Roman history is taught in Germany?
7
You cannot assess rising nationalism in Germany without considering its rise elsewhere in Europe and beyond, including Israel and the US. They are connected.
Nationalistic governments, especially in Poland and Hungary, are explicitly anti-Semitic, but Netanyahu accepts that because those countries blunt Europe Union criticism of Israel's expansionist policies in occupied territories, as well as because Poland, etc. and Israel currently promote the idea of "pure" citizenry. It's a short term, transactional strategy ("realpolitik"), as opposed to strategy based on morality or shared principles. And Trump shows affection to the leaders of Poland, et al. (and Russia!) and disdain toward moderate leaders in Europe.
Similarly in the US, Trump and Tea Party Republicans promote a "pure" America similar to the notion of Aryan "purity" 75 years ago. And despite the explicit anti-Semitism of Trump, who tells Jews right to their face, "You only care about money," and of House Republicans who tweet Jewish names spelled with $, Netanyahu aligns with them for realpolitiks. (It looks like Israel will annex the West Bank as well as the Golan, with US and East European country support.)
Meanwhile, Trump henchman Steve Bannon is running around Europe promoting the very nationalism this article bemoans and Trump's ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell frequently does the same, speaking up for nationalist parties and publicly criticism more centrist ones.
12
As a Turkish-American I have to say that Germany's reckoning with it's past is pretty exceptional. Turkey still doesn't recognize the Armenian genocide or atrocities committed against other minorities. America stands somewhere in between Turkey and Germany in this regard, as do most other countries. Japan, I've heard, still valorizes their World War 2 heroes and denies any wrongdoing.
While it's obviously good for countries to remember their past, their does seem to be some idea that Germany and German people are exceptionally guilty and should never be allowed to forget this.
Just like a lot of the leftists discourse on white people in America this tends to create simmering resentment and feed into right wing extremism. Shame and pride are two sides of the same coin, and being told to feel shame often results in defensive pride, especially if your life is generally not going well.
The lessons of historical evils should not be that any one group is worse than the other, but that all societies need to be vigilant against this kind of thing happening again, and that people can do this kind of stuff. There must be some way to keep alive the memories of things like slavery and the holocaust, and acknowledge their lingering effects on the world, without creating a moral universe where some groups are tarred with irredeemable ancestral guilt, because that idea always seems to backfire eventually.
15
I'm getting closer and closer to something like despair for our world.
As we face existential threats from climate change, superbugs, and weapons of mass destruction, we allow the corporations and oligarchs who profit from these activities to profit even more from the lucrative products that inflame and divide us.
I'll keep fighting, but I will do so with a resignation that I will probably see broad social unraveling and catastrophe in my lifetime. My teenage children may see global collapse.
12
@NFC
You are not alone with your perceptions. The oligarchs and wealthy corporatists are also running out of spaces. That Texas has four times the number of wind power generators than California and Florida is finally building sewerage treatment plants are both positive steps towards a changing, if not better future, for the environment of our children and grandchildren.
2
The policy of remembrance has been a huge success. Today Germany is a fully integrated European nation with many ties to its neighbours. Unfortunately all western nations have been embracing antisemitism and have been shifting towards xenophobia and authoritarianism.
2
I know the German people aren’t unique in their ability to commit racist atrocities even though we pretend like they are. They have had such a strong program of anti-racism and yet they still have a problem with it. I think this shows how readily people become racist and how dangerous it is to have our leaders promoting racist ideas. I think that slavery in the United States was a worse atrocity than the holocaust and we have this idea we are somehow we’re in a position to judge. We have leaders that have been rolling back gains made during the civil rights movement and positioning our judiciary to continue that. I think it’s more likely that we become fascist then Germany because we have already put people in office that are leading us in that direction and have successfully convinced a large percentage of people that this is right. I think there are a lot of scenarios where this could happen. We wouldn’t need a majority of people to approve of that any more than Germany did.
2
Xenophobia sells papers and advances politicians. Anti-globalization is despised by the media and is a political fund-raising killer.
2
This column should be reviewed from the context of the quote oft attributed to Twain, "history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Antisemitism is the most enduring hatred of the parts of the world whose culture was defined by Christian and Muslim traditions. It never disappears, it just varies in intensity. Remember always, that before the excesses of the Nazis, antisemitism was a socially acceptable attitude. Notable antisemitic sources of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, America First, Charles Lindberg, etc., were mainstream in the political dialog of our country during early mid-20th century America. Even Twain, in his effort to be complimentary in his essay, "Concerning the Jews" (1896) relies on negative stereotypes and tropes including one that characterizes Jews as able to overcome Christians through cheating within the law and not trustworthy.
While they might throw out the baby (Nazism) they will keep the bath water in which the germ of antisemitism remains. Any group that relies on traditions that view themselves as the sole source of salvation must, by definition, regard those that reject adherence to that belief system the anti-Christ or the Great Satan. It has been three generations since the last concentration camp was liberated. The need to engage in an effort to overcome the past was necessary to get Germany back to where they were before Hitler. Ah yes, the time before Hitler, when people could feel comfortable with their antisemitism.
6
@Zinkler As many comments here have noted, the anti-semitism in Germany, France, and other European countries today is due to the Muslims that have come in.
“What went wrong?” asks the author, and answers: “not enough shame and slavish breast-beating.”
Here’s what went wrong: Angela Merkel threw open Germany’s borders and German voters are sensibly voting for candidates who promise to close them.
This is actually “liberal democracy” in action.
Merkel’s absurd immigration policies were themselves undemocratic.
8
I make no excuses for those who hate, but Germany is hardly the only country that has committed a genocide- just the only developed nation in the photographic era.
What happened here in these sometimes United States to the first peoples was a slow motion but unstoppable genocide of the various tribal people groups and their culture with the official sanction of the Federal Government. We do not mandate the teaching of the atrocities visited upon the first peoples from the time of Columbus well into the 20th century, but we regularly read about Germany no longer teaching its ugly past to schoolchildren.
It has often been said that slavery was the original sin of America, but before that was the theft of a continent and the destruction of countless tribal peoples already resident here.
7
I don't know whether Germany has forgotten the lesson of the Holocaust, but the United States certainly has.
We have a "president" who spouts blatantly anti-Semitic tropes, and shouts with glee as his rabid supporters scream "Jews will not replace us." He has stated that neo-Nazis and the KKK are some very fine people, while he feigned outrage at the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
My ancestors survived the Armenian Genocide. My mother-in-law survived the Holocaust, one of the few members of her family who was so fortunate. My spouse and I understand exactly what we're seeing in this country. The drumbeat has started. We have a president and Congressional Republicans fanning the flames.
The fact that there has been no serious push back against our "president" or his bigoted supporters ought to give all of us pause for thought.
We as a nation are very much becoming the people Father Neimuller wrote about. We look the other way when our "president" orders Hispanic infants and children be put into cages. This action alone ought to have caused millions of us to hit the streets. We shrug off the escalating hate crimes against the Jewish community since Trump took office, telling ourselves surely things won't get "that bad".
But when, exactly will it be when we say
"Yes. Things are that bad. This has to stop, and we need to stop it, because our leaders surely won't." Are we there yet? If history is any guide, we will continue to remain silent long after that time has come.
14
America is forgetting the lessons of the Nazis, too. In 1939 more than 20,000 attended a pro-Nazi gathering in Madison Square Garden. In that same year both the United States and Canada turned away the St. Louis and its Jewish refugees one quarter of whom would be murdered by the Nazi German white nationalists.
Mr. Hockenos has given us a timely and important reminder. The anniversary of the murder of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1945 by the Nazi German white nationalist was just a few days ago, April 9.
In 1933 already Bonhoeffer had warned Germany that the new white nationalist movement which had just seized power was an idolatrous personality cult in thrall to a demagogue. Soon portraits of the demagogue were installed on the fixed alters of most of the protestant churches across the country. Many of our own evangelical and conservative churches are now doing essentially the same thing again.
8
Sadly Germany passed on that dictator gene to our current president who embraces white nationalism and threatens us with"HIS" military and biker gangs ,read storm troopers. Merkel demonstrated the better part of German nature and most Germans and Americans favor her outlook on politics . In Germany and America we are not looking for a dictator to save our race but leader the world can respect with human values of empathy and morals ,I'm sure after the fever of Trumpmania has left America wanting a moral leader Germany will be our partner in leading the world to a better place.
2
I don't know whether Germany has forgotten the lesson of the Holocaust, but the United States certainly has.
We have a "president" who spouts blatantly anti-Semitic tropes, and shouts with glee as his rabid supporters scream "Jews will not replace us." He has stated that neo-Nazis and the KKK are some very fine people, while he feigned outrage at the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
My ancestors survived the Armenian Genocide. My mother-in-law survived the Holocaust, one of the few members of her family who was so fortunate. My spouse and I understand exactly what we're seeing in this country. The drumbeat has started. We have a president and Congressional Republicans fanning the flames.
The fact that there has been no serious push back against our "president" or his bigoted supporters ought to give all of us pause for thought. We as a nation are very much becoming the people Father Neimuller wrote about. We look the other way when our "president" orders Hispanic infants and children be put into cages. This action alone ought to have caused millions of us to hit the streets.
We shrug off the escalating hate crimes against the Jewish community since Trump took office, telling ourselves surely things won't get "that bad". But when, exactly will it be when we say "Yes. Things are that bad. This has to stop, and we need to stop it, because our leaders surely won't." Are we there yet?
If history is any guide, we will continue to remain silent long after that time has come.
2
That's a mighty broad brush you're using. Instead of "Germany," how about "Disgruntled Segments of Germans" instead?
5
My questions is, Has America forgotten the Nazis? Tragically, some are content to admire and emulate them. Germany has done a far better job at confronting the Nazi legacy than our country, which sent thousands of boys to defeat the worst regime in modern history and secure some semblance of peace and stability. Nationalism of the worst kind now stinks up and shames our nation, a nation founded on ideals that were the very antithesis of the NSDAP.
1
It is somewhat astonishing to me that someone can live in Germany and Central Europe since 1989 (according to Wikipedia) and yet understand so little about the region.
This is, with all due respect, mostly overstated misinterpretation. There isn't a single day where you can't see something on the crimes of the Nazis and WWII on one or several major German TV channels. Every single book store has books and magazines galore devoted to this topic. Museums, foundations, memorials - it is plainly impossible to forget or ignore Germany's past. And that is the way it should be.
Every time one of the AfD pseudo-Führers says something stupid (which is just about every time they open their mouth) there is an outcry in public opinion.
To postulate that Germany is on the brink of forgetting its past makes a good headline, but is pretty bad history or political science...
10
In saying what this article says about post-War Germany and its efforts to face up to its own past, how about including something about the role played by the Pentagon, the CIA & other U.S. institutions in getting Nazi scientists & military out of Germany so they could help in the Cold War. If we are going to criticize Germany for its post-war shortcomings, let's not forget our own role.
5
I find it regrettable that such a good writer would indulge in a piece filled with conclusions based on shaky sources and generalizations. I feel a basic inclination toward Germany bashing is at work. Unfortunately, I often have the impression that the NYT shares its position and its preference for negative reporting on Germany.
I have never the seen the expression of fear in non-White people in this country at the sight of a Police man with bulging arms in his trouser pockets in Germany. There is no equivalent to Fox News or a leading politician belittling people of different race and political stance.
6
It's important to remember that the Nazis were not defeated in WWII. The Nazi ARMY was defeated, and most of that Army simply returned to their lives, free to raise their children with the same ideas they had when they joined that army in the first place.
The same thing happened in the United States after the Civil War: Americans forced the Confederates to free their slaves, and after the war, those states and those people continued to perpetuate the ideas of white supremacy.
Sadly, we struggle to learn the lessons of the past. Fascist armies can be defeated with guns and tanks: we've done it before, and we will probably have to do it again. Fascism itself can only be defeated with schools and education.
Think about who in your countries and states opposes education and the flow of information. Think of who condemns media outlets, news reports and journalists. Those are the soldiers of fascism. How can you help stop them?
4
After reading this, I begin to feel President Trump may have some small justification in wanting to pull the U.S. from NATO, even while I also suspect he is doing it on 'advice' from others. If Germany is going to so much as look longing back down the path it struggled to be free from, why should any Americans stand on the line with Germany, a nation that seems to have forgotten how and why we're in that military alliance in the first place?
3
We really need to focus on the individuals and organizations that exploit these people. Right wing politics, the politics of "against" will always need an enemy to thrive and flourish.
The seductive simplicity of the right-wing agenda readily inflames the small-minded, and it easily gathers momentum when the complexities of life overwhelm the less adaptable. Ignorance of history combines with shortsightedness, and facile remedies to the problems of the day propagate through the populace like a virulent disease. The only effective vaccine is knowledge and understanding of the past. And then we elect a man like Trump - someone with no grasp of the problems or their solutions. Where will this lead?
6
@Bill McGrath I'm not sure where it will lead, especially since Trump is in the USA, and this piece is about Germany. But carry on with your "whataboutism".
1
@Bill McGrath
Bill, your comments reminded me of this quote from C.G. Jung:
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop. It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.”
1
Sorry, but the author is missing the big picture. Germany's past is just a vehicle for the same people that are blaming the Mexicans here in the US. These people don't have any knowledge of the past or of immigration. They are deplorables who think they are being short-changed by today's society. As long as society cannot give these people a perspective and also strict limitations on how to express their frustrations their number will grow.
Unfortunately the media, including this paper, also have a huge part in their emergence by giving the frontrunners (and that includes people like our president) a chance to be part of the acceptable public discourse.
5
Germany has done the best job - arguably in the world - of opening its borders and welcoming outsiders. It's also spent the last 75 years honoring the murdered and enslaved of World War 2 and making recompense to the victims. Compare this to the USA, for example, which has spent zero years honoring those enslaved and murdered - either Native Americans or Africans. Or, the zero years Russia has spent honoring or compensating the millions murdered in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. Have the Belgians, British or French apologized for the millions murdered and enslaved in the name of their nations? As an Acadien, I can assure you Britain has not. What Germany has done is unparalleled in the history of nations. What is happening now in Germany is hardly unique, if alarming, compared to what is happening across the globe.
19
"Compare this to the USA, ..."
You are changing the subject. The fact is that Germany lost the war, and was divided and occupied for years by its former enemies.
For a better analogy, look at the consequences of the American Civil War, which is, in some ways, still being fought.
See, for example, the conflicts over "Confederate" flags and monuments. And note the enthusiasm for Civil War reenactments and the preservation of Civil War battle sites.
Similarly, World War II is not over in Germany.
1
"Compare this to the USA, for example, which has spent zero years honoring those enslaved and murdered - either Native Americans or Africans."
Nope. See:
* National Native American Heritage Month
* National Museum of the American Indian
* Black History Month
* National Museum of African American History and Culture
See also:
"CHARLES CITY, Va. — Virginia has installed its first historical marker to commemorate the lynching of a black man."
Virginia Erects First Historical Marker for Lynching Victim
By The Associated Press
April 11, 2019
1
Paul Hockenos is wrong. The AFD is surely not the upcoming NSDAP of today. But it's true when the author is stating that Germany's culture of remembrance is crumbling. Germany is focusing on other issues with good reason.
At the moment I'm doing a social media campaign based on environmental issues to activate the people to vote when a new European Parliament is going to be on the ballots on the 26th of May. I believe that the European idea is more important to fight for than to keep the waning memories of the 2nd World War and the German atrocities frantically alife (what West Germany did in the 70ies until the 90ies for very good reasons). But it's always worth to remember why the EU was born in the first place.
In the end, economic reasons and the fear of climate change are much more efficient glue for Europe than the memories of the horrendous past. The result, however, will be the same.
3
Over population and not preparing for it in advance, by building more infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and housing, is causing frustration within these nations. It's a symptom of a social problem within the nation, and if governments ignore it, the problem will only get worse. When you let in all these people from over populated nations, you're just transferring the problem from the third world country into your western world nation. Whoever came up with the idea of 'no borders' was an idealist and not a realist. Nations need borders to protect their own citizens. There needs to be more balanced writing on the consequences of 'open borders' and the effects on the victims of mass immigration. There are both black and white supremist groups in the world and the thing is for government to look after all it's citizens, black and white and all the colours in-between. All citizens need equal opportunities and opportunities shouldn't just be limited to new immigrants. I'm glad I live in NZ where we have a small population and our government is working on sorting out social issues. We had a terrorist attack by a white Australian supremist, and he was influenced and gave donations to some white European Identity group, and a couple of white supremist groups in Australia. Media has a responsibility to not scare people with sensationalism and report facts and statistics logically, backed up with evidence. The world isn't being overtaken by immigrants if you look at stats.
6
@CK
Great comment. "Idealism" is a favorable description for those driving globalization. With its rise, there's been some extreme wealth creation among the corporate, political and professional classes.
4
As a current history major in college set to graduate this May, who has concentrated on the period of WWII, I get constant questions about the worth of my humanities degree, the worth of liberal arts as a curriculum in general, and the value of studying history in the first place.
This is why constant and thorough study of history is critical.
33
"... I get constant questions about the worth of my humanities degree, the worth of liberal arts as a curriculum in general, and the value of studying history in the first place."
How do you answer those questions?
BTW, the what-is-it-good-for question is also used to attack some scientific research.
Some Times commenters asked it about the first image of a black hole. Others asked why the money spent on the research couldn't be put to better use helping people on Earth.
How would you answer those questions?
2
@MPN
This is for you and Claire. 45 years ago I received my degree in history but could not find a teaching position so I became a generalist, one who could take dissimilar events, connect them and make sense of what happened. I've always told people that a history major is like a librarian. I don't know what's in all those books behind me but I do know how to research, write and separate fact from fiction. Our world his not a Twitter feed, a sound bite or a 60 second commercial but something more. One who studies history always needs to question the present and the past because nothing is as obvious as it seems.
3
@John L, good response to those questions. IMHO, the world can never have enough well educated science and humanities majors and minors, but it can have too many business majors.
2
...for over fifty years, 24/7, and ten's of millions of dollars I fought against forgetting through understanding...but everything or, at the very least, so many, many things have been working against me and others like me - who knows least about the past, who knows least about the Holocaust -yes, study after study has shown the more the average person is involved in IT the less they know the past , by a massive majority. How many also understand or care what today's businesses did in the past.
We think it is bad in Germany, but in North American - in both USA AND CANADA - it is even worse in its sublime essence.
8
This is ridiculous. No country has dealt with its past like Germany has and still does (fortunately).
There are reminders of the holocaust in every city, all Highschool students visit a concentration camp, and German history is a major subject in every pupil“s curriculum.
How many memorials are there to the Indian holocaust in America ? How many to the millions of victims of America‘s aggressive foreign wars? How much has the US paid in reparations to those victims and the victims of slavery?
If there“s one country that‘s in complete denial of its genocidal past (and present) it is the United States (closely followed by the UK).
Get back to me when the US stops droning dozens of countries, stops caging children, stops overthrowing sovereign countries‘ democratically elected governments, stops torturing people in foreign countries and at home in their prisons, pays reparations to the Indians, African Americans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Iranians, Salvadorians, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Chileans, etc. , puts up memorials in their name and teaches its children the real history of the American Empire, and then I might be willing to entertain this ludicrous notion that Germany is somehow forgetting its past.
74
@Chris, obviously, the article struck a nerve in your case. Go back and reread it, and you will note that it does not fail to recognize and commend Germany’s efforts in trying to correct its past. But it also calls attention to growing and alarming evidence that those efforts are beginning to crumble. Can you deny that it is happening? If so, let’s see your evidence.
You’re efforts to compare our American past with Germany’s fail to hit the mark. We Americans admit we have a real problem with the rise of what I call the Trump thing, but hey! How can you compare that with the systematic extermination of around eight or nine million lives (Jews, Slavs, Roma, political prisoners, handicapped, etc.) in her camps, not to mention another 25 million in a war of aggression? We Americans surely have our warts and a past of slavery and military conquest to correct, but most of us do not subscribe to that Trump thing, and are striving to make up for that past. Remember too that in every war — not just in our wars — there have been losers. Yet in how many of those wars did the victors reach out a helping hand to our erstwhile enemies to get them back on their feet, as we did for Germany, Europe, and Japan after 1945?
3
No, but the US has.
6
“As the memory of World War II, the Holocaust and the Gulag fades, so too does the antipathy to the illiberal ideologies that spawned Europe’s past horrors. This is evidenced in the rising electoral success of populist authoritarian parties of the extreme left and right, none of which have anything new to say, yet claim the mantle of ideological innovation and moral virtue.” James Kirchick, “The End of Europe”
7
The rise of nationalism in Germany is part of a wider phenomenon that includes other germanic countries and even non-germanic european countries... and even non-european countries (like the US). In typical germano-centric fashion, the author is looking for internal causes of what he is seeing in Germany. Attributing it to not sufficiently purging Nazis after the war makes little sense because East Germans did this far more and yet they are more prone to nationalistic sentiments. Attributing it to the more recent relaxing of self-criticism also makes little sense because right wing nationalism is, if anything, greater in Austria (and maybe even Switzerland), where they still have not accepted their responsibility for massive involvement in the Holocaust, i.e. they still commonly maintain that they were the first victims of Nazism. (And never do you hear self-critiques in Austria of the "typical Austrian mentality", as you still do in Germany.) Many europeans countries that were on either side during the war have nationalist movements greater than Germany's. Victimization politics, righteous judgement and other PC tactics regarding the Holocaust may grab a lot of attention, sell papers and politicians, but is not getting at the cause of the problem and may actually contribute to it by fueling a PC-backlash... which will only grab more attention. Self-examination must include the media.
3
Oh, I forgot to offer my view of the true cause of the problem - and this is globalization (embodied by the EU).
5
Certainly Germany should study, understand, acknowledge and learn from its own history.
But people born today do not share guilt for things that their ancestors did.
Intellectual laziness - such as characterizing those who don't favor mass immigration -- as 'racist' (let alone 'Nazi') doesn't foster a learning environment.
14
A better headline would be “Has America Forgotten the Lesson of the Nazis”. We seem poised to embrace the fascist politics of the past. Trumpism is a symptom of a spreading fascist disease in America.
20
@Kevin O’Brien
Kev - I recently reread Alan Bullock's HITLER bio written in 1962. Today's experience is a though the text had been updated/refreshed to fit today's American reality! The underlying basics are the same. In fact, Hitler's Mein Kampf was based on the use of propaganda to manipulate the masses. We just have better tools today - Internet, social media, etc. Down the slippery slope, blinder than bats. Thing is, the human being will believe anything. Education is the only antidote.
Of course Germany has forgotten the lesson of the Nazis.
Why is this a surprise?
I was probably one of the only people who mourned as I watched the Berlin Wall come down.
Uniting that country was a clarion call to fascism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and the resurrection of a culture hooked on blood, soil, the Fatherland, and itself.
They're looking for their new failed Austrian artist to lead them back into their fictional superiority.
4
@historylesson
How would you have felt after the treaty of Appomattox?
1
@historylesson Come again? And may I ask why you would mourn the fall of the Berlin Wall? Yes - reunification brought its challenges, many of which Germany is still dealing with today and will continue to do in the future. But I can still go and eat at a Jewish restaurant here in the city and feel safe. "A culture hooked on blood, soil and the Fatherland" is certainly nothing I have seen here. This kind of talk is divisive, dangerous, and most of all the facts do not support it. So - in this way, this is far from a true historylesson.
2
@historylesson What a shame that you make such comments in such clear ignorance of anything about Germany and the Germans.
2
An American scholar wagging his finger at Germany feels very self-righteous to me at this juncture in time. As if we wouldn't have our own resurgence of virulent nationalism. As if our very own POTUS wouldn't be reaping harvests from this cause. As if we had done a collective soul-searching to come to terms with our own genocide perpetrated against the indigenous people of this country. As if we had come to terms collectively with our history of slavery and its continuing, undisguised fallout. As if Hitler's Nazi regime hadn't been inspired by our own "experimental" procedures designed to enhance ethnic cleansing (see e.g.: https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow). This all not to mention our other, countless perpetrations of violence upon and/or neglect of "others," under the alleged banner of national interest. As it continues today in Puerto Rico and at our southern borders (among other places). If it is true that Germany has forgotten, I wager that we Americans haven't yet even tried to learn the lessons that we might forget.
26
Yes, I've had a bellyful of Germans and Austrians condemning "corporate Democrats" as victims to blame in our failure to be in the majority of cheating Republicans who blocked everything Obama did from day 1 and hate on Democrats who are doing their best to keep a finger in the dike of hate and exclusion. Furthermore, Republicans and other white nationalists calling themselves "Christian" while ignoring Jesus's teachings is disgusting and hypocritical (and Jesus had a good few things to say about that, such as casting first stones and ignoring beams while cultivating motes).
8
@Susan Anderson
Well said.
(In my view, the same should be said about Mr. Sanders and others who persist in the untrue and divisive accusation of "corporate Democrat.")
4
While I think the author's premise is overstated, if not flat-out alarmist, the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, anti-globalism and populist piffle is even more interesting here in the US. We're just one autocratic, pig-headed thug away from...wait...
5
Has Germany forgotten? Have WE forgotten what was fought for in WW II? What we fought against? Did tens if not hundreds of thousands of our soldiers die in vain? We fought for human rights, for the dignity of every person to worship as they please, for democracy against totalitarianism and fascism. Yet our President openly despises immigrants--our nation's bedrock. Our President openly incites violence and hatred toward Muslims, incites Zionist extremism in Israel, supports dictators throughout the world and abhors the free press, a cornerstone of democracy and decency world-over. There are proto-fascists everywhere--there always have been. But WE are reason the far-right, zealots, idealogues and dangerous, hate-filled speech is on the rise world-over. Our President is a dangerous, ignorant man, who nevertheless has influence. And, it is absolutely terrifying to write those words, knowing what he has and will continue to inspire, all over this nation and throughout the world. Christians--have you met your anti-Christ? I think he watches Fox news...
14
“The passing of time doesn’t help, either. Today, millions of Germans were not even born when East Germany fell; to them, the Nazi era feels like ancient history. They struggle to see why they should identify Hitler’s barbarism with their lives.”
The young Germans are completely correct: they should be judged by their own merit and actions, period. They have no special obligation to bear guilt.
While the author is lamenting a perceived increase of extremism in Germany, the Chinese have soberly rounded up and placed in concentration camps over a million members of a minority group based solely on their ethnic identity. The alarm went off a while ago, but nobody is doing anything.
6
@NorthernVirginia I grew up in Germany (I'm a dual-citizen) and now live in the US. I often run into people telling me "You don't have to feel guilty, you weren't born" and I appreciate the thought behind it. However, I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here.
I do not feel guilty nor do my peers. We weren't born and our grandparents were only children. We know that. But we want to keep the memory alive. It's a very different thought. I think part of the "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung" was to try to turn it into something positive. Of course, it is impossible to create something positive enough to "balance" the committed genocide. But since the genocide cannot be undone, maybe we can at least raise awareness and do our part to make sure it is never forgotten.
I was lucky enough to still have grandparents who told me about their horrific experiences growing up. My grandparents grew up in a different country than me; aside from the language spoken, they hardly have anything in common. I'm grateful for the country I grew up in and I would like for everyone to be able to grow up in peace.
That is why we want to remember what NOT to do. Hatred is never an answer and if Germans can be a beacon for that statement, I think that is something to be proud of.
12
One can detest anti-semitism, but if you don't blame Jews for Israel's Middle-East policies, who would you blame? Of course not all Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, support those policies. But the current alliance of Trump and Netanyahu doesn't seem to be helping matters.
7
@Antoine,
I blame the Israeli government, not "Jews."
7
What about the lack of Palestinian assistance from their so-called Arab "brethren?"
8
@Antoine Jews who live outside of Israel have little influence on the government in the State of Israel. Blame the State of Israel, if you will, but don’t blame “Jews” as a people. It is statements like yours that do smack of anti-Semitism, as if all Jews are responsible, no matter where they live. And though I, too, don’t approve of Israel’s Middle East policies, I also recognize that the situation is much more complex than most people realize. It is not clear what people like you think Israel should do instead. They can withdraw from everything occupied in 1967, and then what? With whom and what stable government will they ensure safe borders?
9
Two quick points:
1. This is a question for America as well and its citizens as we see the rise of Trump and very "fine people on both sides".
2 Placing the blame on Israel for Israeli policies towards Palestinians doesn't strike me as "Nazi" thinking in fact it might actually be the opposite of such thinking. Does it not strike anyone else, the irony of a people once rounded up and forced into ghettos, having their property seized by the state, now placing others in ghettos and sizing their property?
Fascism in whatever form should be strangled in the grave.
8
@Doug You changed the wording. The problem isn't that people blame Israel, it's that they blame Jews. Do you see the difference?
1
Mr. Hockenos--Makes no mention of the main cause for the rise of the AfD and that is gradual erosion of the post WWII economic success. The same factors that operate here in the US are eating away at the EU as well: Inequality of income, lessing of the social safety net, and most importantly the loss of hope for the future.
8
I thought as a younger student of history that Germany came to uber-nationalism, i.e., because it got a late start as a nation going from Prussia to encompassing the effects of WWI. As in the United States, apparently when there is an amoral leader pushing buttons on those are not doing as well as others, realistically or not, the specter of fascisim rises. Hungary, Italy, here and there (Brexit anyone?), the perverse power of the Internet, and true worries about economic inequality can combine to inflame and reopen wounds.
4
We have to remember that for a majority of Germans who lived through it, the Hitler period was an invigorating time of national renewal after the shame of WWI defeat and economic humiliation. There was negligible resistance from those troubled by the regime. Anti-Semitism was, and sadly still is, an easy sell all over Europe from Paris to Moscow. The cheap excitements of fascism--the symbols, the scapegoats, the spectacles and the obliteration of reason and choice--were a heady mix and still hold fascination 75 years after the Nazi defeat. German unification under the Prussians was a destabilizing force, leading to ferocious and frustrated Imperialist ambitions, a catastrophe for Europe to match the Black Death. Less hate-filled and lethal alternatives must be found and offered to assuage these passions that always lie dormant under the crust of civilized society.
5
I'm surprised no one has pointed out that "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" is not "overcoming the past" but "coming to terms with the past" -- a huge difference! When I grew up in Germany in the 70s and 80s, that was the key didactic project of the state, infused into school lessons, museum shows, and mass media. "Wehret den Anfängen!" (resist the beginnings) and "Nie wieder!" (never again) were the slogans of my generation. It was not a perfect project, and of course it had blind spots and perhaps some of it was self-exculpatory. We knew, even as we watched the newsreels from concentration camps in appalled silence, that we could never "come to terms" with the holocaust or the war, only continue to work towards an understanding of history.
Up until this moment, those lessons at least seemed resilient and were being paid forward. They are what enabled many Germans to rally around the migrants in the recent unprecedented wave of immigration from the Middle East and Africa in spite of the enormous social and financial pressures that political decision exerted. I hope they will prove resilient still.
16
@RER Yes, I grew up in multiple areas in (West) Germany in the 60s and 70s. Coming to terms with Nazism and WWII was a daily exercise. The schools did an excellent job of teaching us history in context, rather than dates and battles, while also encouraging critical thinking. One of the strongest messages, one I still carry with me, was about the responsibility that comes with privilege. We were told regularly that our free access to education and culture came with the responsibility to take our studies seriously so we could be informed and critical citizens making ethical choices.
5
@RER the verb "to overcome" translates to bewaeltigen, ueber etwas hinwegkommen, ueberstehen, so both are correct translations.
@RER
I also wondered why nobody has pointed out the incorrect translation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the article, but, unlike you, I don't believe the author made a mistake - how could he?
No, I am convinced he's pushing his deliberate mistranslation precisely for the reason you mention, though without making the connection: much of what is wrongly now termed "antisemitism" is simple resistance to the invasion of Germany by hordes of non-European peoples. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is promoted as an excuse for the Migrants Welcome European suicidal policy - Ms Merkel has stated it on several occasions.
The American left is every bit as antisemitic as the AfD in Germany, but you won't get NYT to admit it.
8
@me Perhaps you mean anti-Zionist? My own reading of the American left doesn't support a characterization of antisemitism. And, yes, they are different things.
7
@MiguelPrimer Depends what you mean by Zionism.
Do you consider Israel "a settler-colonial state" that exists to oppress the "indigenous" people -- a characterization frequently found on the left (and a bedrock tenet of Palestinian "resistence")?
A 2,000-year-long narrative of Exile (and, being Exile, of eventual Return) -- a narrative extending back further still, through to the story of the Exodus recited every Passover -- is at the heart of Jewish continuity and cohesion; it's the heart of Jewish identity itself.
A means must be found to guarantee equal rights to ALL who live in the land between the river and the sea, regardless of ethnicity. That might well require Israel to re-imagine itself as a multi-ethnic (rather than a "Jewish") state. This simply means detaching "nationality" from ethnicity" -- recognizing (as we do in America at its best) that "self-determination" is an individual (rather than collective) right.
We're all "indigenous" here on Planet Earth. That's very different from branding the Jewish narrative (and Jewish identity) as an anachronism or a fraud.
Certainly Jews and Muslims in Germany should be treated with respect and not be persecuted or vilified, but it is hard to overlook the historical and moral lapses in the author's presentation.
Left unmentioned, for starters, is that German pro-Palestinian activists, including even some German Jewish pro-Palestinian activists, face ostracizing and harassment at the hands of the German government, urged on by some German Jewish communal leaders and the Israeli government. No Nazi historical legacy justifies this.
The WWII era seems to get a generalized treatment that does not do justice to its myriad complexities and horrors. Many Germans were rightfully brought to justice after the war, and Germany has certainly made commendable efforts, it seems, to teach the historical injustices that were committed.
Yet, the author takes umbrage about Germans being presented as victims. Actually, they were. Over two million German civilians were killed during the war, and it was largely not be accident. They were victims of terrible war crimes, even if they were Germans.
He frets that not enough has been done to punish wrongdoers and root out fascism, but he seems to have nothing to say about the fact that while numerous Germans were tried and punished, there was no apparent effort to hold to account any of the Soviets, Americans, British, or French who committed war crime horrors against innocent German civilians.
2
Despite the fact that I agree with the idea that to protect democracy we need to exercise eternal vigilance, I think the media in general are far too fond of exaggerating the popularity and rise of the right in either Europe or here.
32
@Rebecca Hogan I used to wonder how Hitler could so easily be elected and then become dictator. Now I understand only too well in the grisly detailed rise of Donald Trump in my own nation. Our country is holding together at present; but make no mistake: he would much rather be proclaimed Dictator. And his fans would relish it. This is the power of hate.
11
Rebecca, five years ago it would have been unthinkable to imagine a white nationalist march in the USA where an innocent citizen was killed and yet the American president could not bring himself to condemn either the perpetrators or the violence itself. Meanwhile, law enforcement continues to warn us that our greatest danger now is right-wing terrorism. If anything, we are concerned not nearly enough.
251
@Rebecca Hogan
Where in history has it been that when the minority just stops complaining justice will prevail? Nowhere...
The alt-right and the new ways in which they recruit and gain power is a global issue for concern.
35
Rust never sleeps.
The natural tendency of the human animal when certainty dissipates and ambiguity increases is to reach for simplicity. In politics, that's usually associated with some degree of authoritarianism.
Anomie is the enemy of compassion, and also of democracy and pluralism. Take away a progressive narrative and a sense of purpose, and people will feel adrift, and be easy prey to those who give them a simplistic narrative and a xenophobic purpose.
23
"The AfD is riding a shocking rise of German anti-Semitism and xenophobia."
Said "shocking rise "is neither shocking , nor a rise.
The author's contention is predicated on the belief that German anti-semitism decreased ,while what had happened was that Germans had learned that it wasn't acceptable to voice the anti-semitic , xenophobic beliefs which they had continued to maintain all along.
Now, they feel safe in expressing the beliefs that they had maintained all along.
54
@DJS
I’ve lived in Berlin for ten years - yesterday I took part in a mixed league softball game for a team which includes players with German, Japanese, US American, El Salvadoran, Dominican, Iranian, Czech and Philippine backgrounds - among others. And yes, there are Jews and Gentiles and Atheists on the squad. There is a tolerance to be found in Berlin and throughout Germany which puts the lie to your provincial view - come see for yourself.
24
@DJS That statement is so incredibly untrue that's it's not worth answering.
6
@DJS
AfD won mostly in Eastern Germany where there were no Vergangenheitsbewältigung. That area of Germany is both anti-semitic and anti-immigrant.
It is said that the rise of AfD is due to the huge immigration. The fun part is that AfD won in places where the immigrants did not settle (e.g. Saxony) and lost in places where the immigrant moved in (e.g. Westphalia)
Also the rising Black and Asian population are anti-semitic because of Israel. They say it openly. If you think anti-semitism is rising in Germany then you have not seen Britain and France!
6
If Germany has forgotten, America is a very lost cause.
The more WWII veterans we lose, the more the Nazi-like movement strengthens. I really just wonder what my dad would say after his experiences of fighting on German ground.
3
@MIMA
My very Catholic grandfather, a flawed man who served in Europe, said almost nothing to his grandchildren who were raised Jewish. But every Christmas as the rest of the family expressed their disapproval of my vegetarianism, he took the opportunity to tell us to stand up for what you know is right and do not back down.
Some things are and always will be that simple.
2
THIS is why Germany has another 100 years (minimum) of "good behavior" before it can ever hope to have a seat on the Permanent Security Council.
3
@TFD
Personally I would keep out of that council forever even, as each of its permanent members carries a significant history of wrongdoings with them, some of them being nearly at par with what Germans did during the Third Reich.
Only if the article topic is different, Germans are URGED to 'take more responsibility' 'lead more' 'spend more money on the NATO' or whatever is fashionable then.
I think besides some politicians and lobbyists no one in Germany is really eager to join any more councils. Maybe some bureaucrats from Brussels can do that instead ;)
Keeping our animal instincts at bay is like trying to beat back the tide with a broom: It leads to sweeping defeats.
After visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin, I realized that in the last thousand years, war has always returned despite occasional interludes of peace that might last for a lucky person's lifetime. "Learning from history, it seems..." No, it IS. Over and over again.
5
1) The author connects German 'neo-fascism' to antisemitic crimes and atmosphere in Germany. While it is one thing to be Israel-sceptic (which in German surveys oftenly is being counted as 'antisemitic tendency'), antisemitic hate-crimes and -speach are a different thing imho. A recent study among jewish victims of such crimes concluded, that 81% of the vicitims claimed that the attackers/offenders were muslims.
Source: https://uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/daten/JuPe_Bericht_April2017.pdf
In contrast, the German statistic counts these crimes under 'fascist hate crime', also doing so when no offender can be identified. Which may be misleading given the additional information from the study.
2) While the AfD party undoubtedly has significant problems with neo-fascist members and even politicians, the question is whether voting AfD is a strong indicator for fascism or if its voters mainly try to opposition the migration movements since 2015 (more than 2m mostly muslim, low educated people moved to Germany since 2015, many of them illegally up until today), which happened almost unchallenged by any party, except the AfD. That only changed recently when the conservatives noticed that the problems with migrants became too obvious to ignore.
6
We have to remember that for a majority of Germans who lived through it, the Hitler period was an invigorating time of national renewal after the shame of WWI defeat and economic humiliation. There was negligible resistance from those troubled by the regime. Anti-Semitism was, and sadly still is, an easy sell all over Europe from Paris to Moscow. The cheap excitements of fascism--the symbols, the scapegoats, the spectacles and the obliteration of reason and choice--were a heady mix and still hold fascination 75 years after the Nazi defeat. German unification under the Prussians was a destabilizing force, leading to ferocious and frustrated Imperialist ambitions, a catastrophe for Europe to match the Black Death. Less hate-filled and lethal alternatives must be found and offered to assuage these passions that always lie dormant under the crust of civilized society.
6
A more appropriate questions is has the WORLD forgotten the lessons of the Nazis?
2
@Gord Lehmann
Ask Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan. Both sat by and did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide. And they had the power and authority to actually do something.
1
The author asks a valid question. He does seem have forgotten two big lessons from History though....
The Versailles Treaty where Germany was humiliated and made to be second class citizens
Ms Merkels disastrous open arms policy which again diluted Germany is German. that not only ignited nationalism in Germany, but all of Europe and The United States of American
8
@Sara
When you cite the Versailles Treaty, you must also in good conscience cite the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, imposed by a victorious Imperial Germany upon Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk
In comparison, the Allies' terms were generous.
1
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” was lost in translation. It does not mean “the overcoming of the past”, but a responsibility for “coping with the past.” The seriousness of the AfD’s increased popularity notwithstanding, I do not believe that this article contributes to reckoning with Germany’s past and finding ways to cope. It only widens already existing polarities.
5
@JP
While we are on the subject of German terms as you have translated "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" correctly:
This piece is a typical example for up-to-date German "Haltungsjournalismus".
No wonder. What is to expect when the German part of the socialisation of the author has been taken place at "Otto Suhr Institut", "taz" and all kinds of Berlin "Kiez(e)"?
There is nothing wrong with that but due to this environment you are prone to the flaws and deficits of this environment. Too much "Haltung" is one these flaws. A big problem of view is many advocates of such point are too often tempted to locate all other views immediately from "RW" to "fascist", "racist" and "Nazi". Mr. Bittner - you might know him, he is contributing Op-Ed writer of NYT - has critizised the journalistic form of such "Haltung"-approach in a recent article of "Die Zeit".
The real problem of this "school of thought" - it is no ral school, mostly it´s fesal of thinking and doing the job right - is not the external appearances addressed by Mr Bittner in his article but the typical replacement of all general rules of assessment and appreciation of facts by the awareness of the correctness own more or less ideologic approach to any caseswhereever it comes from.
If it´s "Richtige Gesinnung" against "Die Rechten" it must be right - no matter if such "Haltung" is nothing but ideologic wishful thinking based on weak arguments and "Die Rechten" came to an unwelcomed "4" just by the adding of 2 and 2.
Never again would have had a much better chance of success if these great words were intended for all parties concerned, that they were not has absolutely nothing to do with the Germans. It is a resurrection of our communication capabilities that is behind the wake up our world is now experiencing, an increasing awareness where only half the story will no longer suffice as credible information, if indeed it ever did.
3
From the article: "... Forty percent of Germans say it’s right to blame Jews for Israel’s policies in the Middle East. ..."
How can we account for the fact that only forty, not one hundred, percent say so, since close to one hundred percent of Germans must know that Israel is a Jewish state? It follows that Jews (Israel's political leadership) are responsible for Israel's ME policy.
This question sounds specious, but is not.
One reason for the "40%" may be that when some Germans hear the term "Jews" they are not thinking of Israel's population and leadership, but of the construct of "global Judaism," and answer the question with that frame.
Another reason may be that most German's know that it is incorrect and harmful to "blame the Jews", and won't do so even though they know that Israel's government makes policy and is populated and led primarily by Jews.
And for some German's such a stupid question might incur a knee-jerk negative reply, since anyone asking such a stupid question must be up to something.
I have no problems with "Jews" or with "Germans" but find it unacceptable that "journalists" don't think that 40% finding to be really suspect.
2
@Pat Hayes That makes no sense. Why should anyone hear the term "Jews" and understand it to mean "Israel's population and leadership," when that's not what it means?
1
Liberal democracies has failed their people. And people have the right to raise against a class of liberal, radical chic politicians. It is happening. Thank God. It is happening.
5
@Maria You may regret your embrace of authoritarianism when you are not allowed to practice your profession; when you can't get a mortgage, credit card, or any bank loan without your husband's signature; when you lose your right to vote, to divorce, or obtain birth control or an abortion.
Those you call liberal, radical, and chic politicians all worked for women to obtain those rights.
15
@Maria If the rain is hard and cold enough, even a cage will look inviting for the shelter it brings. But once the sun is out again, you will realize it is still just exactly that: a cage.
2
The root cause of the far-right renaissance across the European continent can be summed up in two words : Angela Merkel.
Even though it is praiseworthy to provide a reasonable degree of humanitarian aid to refugees, Merkel's self-righteous hectoring of fellow European Union states reluctant to apply unlimited assistance to migrants was the match which lit the fuse catapulting Orban, Salvini and other assorted extremists to power in the EU. Her arrogant attitude was also responsible for the disastrous Brexit debacle in Great Britain.
Hell is paved with good intentions. Unfortunately Merkel's ill-advised actions and attitude will threaten peace and stability in Europe for decades to come.
2
@AE, well, just to blame Angela Merkel is too simple. It was not the failure of the German government back in 2015 that the Dublin regulations didn't work, i.e. that refugees or economical migrants were walking through the south-east part of Europe because these countries were not applying existing laws, while the migrants believed that Germany is the (economical) heaven. That problem is a very large one with multiple reasons. The resurrection of the far right has also multiple triggers, and not only one lady in Berlin who in a very seldom moment shows her private opinion by welcoming refugees. The problem will not disappear once Mrs. Merkel is out of office in the future.
6
@Sarah
People in Hungary do have the right to criticize policy, European or internal.
Review all the reports in the media of opposition demonstrations in the most recent years. Not a single mention of government interference !
What the media conveniently failed to mention, though:
The police were there, not to interrupt, but to ensure that counter demonstrators do not interfere with the protests.
Contrast that with the previous, so called "socialist", regime's handling of mass demonstrations in 2006 during the anniversary of the revolution of 1956. From tear gas to kicking demonstrators thrown to the ground you can find all examples of brutalizing those who dared to protest.
2
The mythology of the strong and strict father exists in every society, commingled with the experience of many of being raised by nurturant parents. That tension sometimes becomes unbalanced, requiring “eternal vigilance,” as it’s sometimes called. The right-wing, in Germany and everywhere, have a “daddy-problem.” It’s not a problem that goes away. It’s a problem that needs to be handled—an imbalance that needs to be balanced.
Stagnated wages, increasing inequality, outsourcing/automation of work, immigration of poorer foreigners into west, . It's not very surprising people are turning to extremes.
The political status quo represents for most westerners an unending slide in standards of living until they meet the rising standards of the third world in the middle.
Given global wealth inequality and predicted crises in climate change outward looking empathic political platforms feel almost suicidal.
6
While Germany is obviously a totally unique case when it comes to far right history, it's worth remembering that much of the world that was once thought stable and democratic has been listing dangerously right. People and parties are emboldened to espouse far right views openly. The real question then is have we all forgotten the lessons of the Nazis?
1
Not having done it, I would think that emigrating to a foreign land would take an immense amount of courage. For so many people to do so from certain lands would seem to indicate that things are very, very bad in those lands. Just as warm air displaces cold air, it is a law of physics that movement from terrible places to better ones will be unstoppable. Just as West Germany took East Germany under its wing, the comfortable world needs to improve the condition of the Hells that surround us.
2
People of good will should look hard at the seismic shift in much of the western democracies towards new- fascism and all it represents. Perhaps it might start with a fresh examination of slavery in this country and the persistence of racism and hate under trump.
It seems apparent that the emergence of hate groups has resulted from mass migration of Muslims fleeing the tyranny of terror in their own midst. In America, we can also see the radicalization of hate based on the fear of the migration of people of color crossing our southern border causes by the extreme right. The emergence of the extreme left, the consequence of and reaction to the hate of the right is a prelude to a dangerous divided world.
1
Hockenos writes: "In my neighborhood in Berlin, and others across the country, people wearing Jewish headgear are harassed on the street."
By whom? The passive voice here isn't helpful. I've read several articles that say the people harrassing Jews in Germany are disproprtionately (though certainly not exclusively) recent immigrants from the Middle East.
For example: https://www.thelocal.de/20180814/israelis-facing-anti-semitism
14
Guilt will only drive a generation or two.
After that you have to make the case that a course of action is in the self-interest of the country.
Sometimes that self-interest is consistent with the interests of other countries and sometimes it conflicts with others.
But whatever course of action you take, wanting to control one's borders is not xenophobic. That control can be limited by certain economic and political agreements. But no one should be surprised or outraged when citizens look around themselves and ask for a more controlled immigration policy.
24
Let's not just blame the Germans! All of Europe appears to have gained more nationalists who do not like immigrants for fear of losing their ethnic identity and culture. The average Brit wanted Brexit. Many French do not like Muslims or Jews.The Hungarians and Poles seem to be turning to the Right. And of coarse in the US the white supremacists have gained membership.
5
"The AfD is riding a shocking rise of German anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Forty percent of Germans say it’s right to blame Jews for Israel’s policies in the Middle East. ...In surveys, ever more say they desire an authoritarian leader and distrust liberal democracy."
There's nothing "shocking" about this, it's just a replay of where Germany was in the waning years of the Weimar Republic as the Reichstag elections of 1933 illustrated. In that election, Communists, Socialists, and Moderate parties together accounted for 44% of the vote, the Nazis accounted for 44% of the vote which combined with the 8% of a Conservative traditional party provided the basis for Hitler's rise to power.
The Germany of today, in spite of its belief that it is the "moral leader of continental Europe" resembles its earlier incarnation to an uncomfortable degree. That should be of no surprise.
The postwar effort to overcome the horrific German past was never going to have the success hoped for. Even the forced "reeducation camps" of more recent repressive states have had limited success.
In America where its bloodiest war was fought over slavery, the underlying racial forces still have strong political and social significance today, 150 years later. In that regard, the nominal 44% of voter support that Trump exhibits bears a troubling similarity to the Germany of 1933.
What lessons...how to build a great national highway system, put the latest mass communication technology in every home (radios), and put a "People's Car (Volkswagen) in every garage? I'd call all these things to be proud of...not lessons to be learned.
7
You forgot to mention the people's bathtub, the 'Volksbadewanne' so everyone could have clean armpits when they raised their right arm for the "Gruss"
@John
A lesson to be learned: No good deed ever goes unpunished.
The larger question is has America Forgotten the memory of the NazisA
1
More importantly has America forgotten the lesson of the Nazis, racism, and marginalizing groups of people? We need to fix our own problems before we point fingers at Germany.
White nationalism has raised its ugly head in the US and Trump is stoking it with his rants against Muslims, Hispanics, and any other group that isn't white. And the Jewish population of the US should not be fooled because the moment Trump determines it would be to his advantage to attack them, he will.
This is the person who stated that there were "good people on both sides" when neo-Nazi white nationalists marched in VA and chanted "Jews will not replace us."
Never forget.
1
You know what caused this to happen? The post-nationalism that in-power politician and bureaucrats decided to double-down on during the migrant crisis. Prior to opening the gates as it were, these were small fringe groups, that the majority of normal germans would not associate with due to the public opprobrium they would face. Merkel and the CDU's decision essentially broke down the reserve and pushed concerned voters who would otherwise be CDU loyalists into AfD. Essentially they pushed things too far for the time period and this is the resulting political reaction we are seeing play out.
6
"New research" shows that few Nazis were brought to justice? This has been known for decades. After the initial Nuremberg trials of the Nazi bigwigs, little was done about prosecuting lower-level criminals. Any many of those who were prosecuted received light sentences. The US and British governments shared responsibility with the Germans for this go-easy policy. No new research was needed to establish these facts.
3
The Nazis came to power in the context of a worldwide economic collapse. That kind of instability provides opportunities for the ruthless to enhance their power and influence.
Add in the instability that comes from the impact of climate-related catastrophes. There's plenty of reason to worry about what will happen when the next migration, which will come, makes people feel insecure.
It's too bad that people bought into the idea that government is the enemy. That makes it impossible for democratic government to ameliorate suffering. I believe that, during crises, the government is the only hope for solutions.
Yes, there are dangers. Governments can be corrupt and tyrannical. So can individuals, including the plutocrats who have so much influence around the world.
11
As I read this article I couldn't help having one thought: Trump.
5
Apparently America has also forgotten those lessons.
3
More importantly, has America forgotten its part in the struggle against fascism?
2
One of the cardinal characteristics of the rise of Nazism was the failure of ordinary decent folks to speak up or resist. There was resistance, of course, but many more either shrugged their shoulders or looked away from the worst Nazi behavior because the party brought some things that they wanted/needed. Some went along out of fear. It happens time and time again in human history as folks tolerate what they might previously though intolerable because of promises made - some desired end justifies the means.
We see this playing out in many places around the world at this particular moment in history, including in this country. In the midst of it, the "decent" people never really think that the things they tolerate in order to reach a desired goal are really "that bad." That's probably what a lot of Germans told themselves in the 1930s as well.
3
@Anne-Marie Hislop
Hitler shot and killed people who spoke up and resisted. Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, then police chief of Munich. The purpose of the camp was to contain enemies of the state, people, like church clergy, who voiced opposition to the measures Hitler was implementing. The Nazi regime was much more brutal than most people realize.
“Learning from history, it seems, is an exercise in democracy that can never stop.” Specially when democracy is ruled by capitalism.
1
Germany has spent a lot of time, as noted, contemplating the Nazi Era, although as this opinion also notes it has not succeeded as it once thought it had. But, the citizens of many countries (US, UK, Hungary, Poland, India, Russia,Etc.) have also embraced their own versions of Nationalism/Lost Glory narratives. Perhaps we should all spend more time contemplating how shaken the "average" person was by the economic upheaval of the Great Recession (beyond just relying on the recovery of GDP), and their visceral response(s) to the perceived threats of "globalization" to country, culture, religion, and social order. I am not proud of much of what I hear about these issues in various US media, so we also need to deal with how much/how little progress we have made.
4
How true, we humans are funny animals, given that we use mostly our raw emotions in our day to day activities...and relegate reason (what makes us human) just to confirm what we did (or didn't). Too bad our educational system is not making us aware of subconscious prejudices brewing out there, a Trumpian tendency to suspect evil in 'the other' and start attacking out of proportion of an invented deed. We have forgotten the richness conferred by our diversity, and our strength by our inclusion, and the need for tolerance as each of us is, luckily, different. But trying to forget the past is highly dangerous. Santayana said it well: "Those that cannot remember the past may be condemned to repeat the mistakes committed, in this case the genocide. As if this wasn't enough to dissuade us to do what's prudent, what of the hypocrisy of those that, knowingly, willingly, try to forget what history teaches us? Who said that democracy is a passive sport? It demands active participation, so to avoid demagogues and charlatans remove our freedom...in the name of security. Germany may have its problems but look at how many other nations are being subdued by self-serving despots, dividing people by using fear and hate of 'the other'. Of course, mentioning the vulgar bully in the White House may be pure coincidence.
1
I know of what you write. I live in the deep South. Is there any confusion about the fact that a war that ended over 150 years ago still resonates with low IQ people led by high IQ evil doers? Got doubts? Watch TV wrasllin' and the fervor of the fans in the arena. Then watch a Trump rally. Nuff said.
4
The EU concept of open borders has caused more problems than its worth. It gives the intolerant among them the excuse to display their vitriol. The AfD has its equivalent in most European countries and elsewhere in this world. Ignorance outlasts memory.
1
@Karen
I don't share your view. The open borders in the EU are wonderful. No more fidgeting with passports and changing money. Living with citizens of other countries, languages and views is a positive. Never again back to the small national state. The AfD is a positive phenomenon. Out in the open the ugly views can be countered. And 14% is not 40 %.
1
I always felt that the reunification of Germany took place about 1,000 years too early.
2
There is no way around the fact that in the world there are "young" souls and "old" souls. Unless, one has personally experienced the hell that hate brings (destruction and great suffering) one lacks the maturity to be a man or woman of peace. If the world is an incubator of young souls -as it appears to be - then war is a natural state in which the "bad" guys shoot first and eventually, (united by the threat posed by the bad guys) the "good" guys shoot last - over and over again. It's all part of human Ivolution (the evolution of human self-consciousness).
1
Those politicians and people who oppose the rise of the rabid right wing need to speak out and protect Jews, and the Roma. It was inevitable that those who lived through the war would die and the lessons would be taught third hand. Those who believe Nazism to be wrong must speak out, no matter the cost.
Germans will always be Germans, and the world should be very afraid. Why did Europe ever permit the reunification of two aggressive countries which when unified caused 100 million deaths between 1914 and 1945? Remember the Tom Lehrer song about Germany from the 1960's, when people still remembered the wars: "We taught them a lesson in 1918 and they have hardly bothered us since".
Having said that, the mass influx of Muslims and Africans into Europe created the rise of the current right, just as mass illegal immigration has in the US. Millions of Muslims brought their own deep antisemitism to Europe, and natives' anger at the threat to their own culture revived the ancient antisemitism that is always simmering just below the surface of European society.
1
@JBR
What do you mean by "Germans?" There are so many differences among Germans due to history and "tribe." There was and is an enormous difference between a person from Hamburg and let's say the Alpes. There are the braves and cowards, bigots and the enlightened. Not different from anywhere else. And a more nuanced historical view would be welcome.
It is at least plausible that an every increasing flood of Third World refugees and migrants will turn out to be disastrous for the German people, and that the best course of action for them would be to act to cut that flow as quickly and sharply as possible. At the very least, this is a possibility that the Germans should carefully consider. But Leftists like Mr. Hockenos insist that no, Germans must close their minds to such thoughts, and refuse to even think about what is best for them today. Why? Because Hitler. Because Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler!
In life Hitler was a monster, but in death he has become one of the greatest allies the internationalist Left has ever had. He has become a club that the Left can use to beat down and suppress wrongthink. How dare you worry about what is best for your nation and your people today! That's what Hitler thought! Keep thinking like that and Hitler will burst out of the grave and time will roll backwards and it will be 1932 again!
Even in Germany, at some point the past must become the past.
5
I have only spent a short time in Eastern Europe and former communist countries. But during that time I found an unexpected resentment against modern capitalism, even in its more modified forms,
For some of the people I met free market capitalism meant no longer having a set job but needing to go out and get one, no longer having paid vacations at established vacation lands, and the loss of the communities that had been sustained by the state apparatus. I wonder if this underlying hostility, still there since the wall came tumbling down, is adding to this far right dynamic, at least in the East.
10
A cautionary article, to be sure, and one can hope that the criticisms herein, underplaying the strength of moderates and left-of-center Germans are valid. Otherwise, the old saying that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it will have to be reckoned with. Again.
2
Since when have the Germans been sensitive to the influx and influence of "outsiders"? Well at least since the Roman empire. Do we Americans really understand German history as a young country set between two large oceans? I think the German identity had to fight to survive over at least two brutal millennia. The Germans live in the crossroads of Eurasia, a tough neighborhood historically. Do we imagine that long difficult history vanquished by a few decades of liberal thought? Dream on.
2
@Mr. Jones There is a difference between real danger from the outside and an imagined one. Germany was never occupied by the Roman Empire. The Romans tried but failed and were content with keeping the Germans from pillaging the lands that the Romans had conquered. Germany has had a history of feeling threatened by Russia, Britain and France, which opposed German expansion to the east. In that respect, some Germans share the persecution complex of Russians like Putin, who feel that eastern Europe should kowtow to Russia.
1
@Alan Mass, just to correct you on one topic: Present-day Germany is just the eastern part of the empire built by the followers of the Roman Empire, the Merowinger and Franks (where France is the western part of that Empire between 450-900 A.C.). Most of the western and southern towns in present day Germany became cities due to the Romans, although they were settled a couple of thousands years before: Xanten, Cologne, Mainz, Trier, Worms, Augsburg, Regensburg, etc.. The "civilization" inherited from the Romans is shared by France, Germany, Spain, Italy and also Britain. What's now east Europe has really no connection to that ancient civilization.
1
How many Americans remember the Jews trying to flee from Germany on the MS St. Louis? (We didn't want the Jews, so they had return to Germany, where many of the died.) And now that we have a third of our population that doesn't want women and children escaping violence in Central America to enter the US, it's obvious that we have an even shorter memory than the Germans.
2
It is early to claim that we have learned the lessons of history on good economic and social times. It is the hard times, though, that really tell the tale. Can anyone be certain how Germans would react today if faced with the situation that prevailed in the early 1930's?
12
Historical amnesia...
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. —Milan Kundera
Who remembers Milan or Hannah Arendt? On april fool's day, Milan got 90-years old.
5
The political right may or may not have learned the lessons of history. The political left certainly has not.
Ethnic diversity is unstable and dangerous. Diversity is the reason Austro-Hungary exploded into WW I. It is the reason Jugoslavia exploded into genocide. It is the reason Czeckoslovakia no longer exists and why there was mass murder inside the Turkish Empire during WW I. Diversity is the reason for the Rwandan genocide and for the horrors of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960's. And on, and on, and on.
Germany's importation of millions of foreigners whom the Germans do not want to integrated and who do not want to be integrated was, and is, a recipe for disaster. This was obvious thirty years ago. It is bad and it will get worse and it is entirely the fault of the political left who have not even figured out---speaking of the lessons of history---that socialism fails, catastrophically, 100% of the time.
7
@Haim so the mere existence of people who are different in some respect is "dangerous"? Not ignorance, not economic insecurity, not hatred, not fear...the mere existence of people who are different? Seriously?
4
Hockenos notes that while the country has dealt laudably with its past antisemitism, it "overlooked other aspects of the Nazis’ genocidal racism, like its anti-Slavism, the genocide of Roma and the incarceration of homosexuals in concentration camps."
Anti-Slavism? Hey, Thanks! From a Russian (subspecies American).
This main feature of Nazism, eg the starving to death of three million Red Army POWs in the first six months of the Russian-German war, is mentioned only rarely in discussions of Hitler's persecution,
But Hockenos misses an essential point.
In rating the atonement of a nation, the sins and expiations of its opponents should be mentioned. We deal with victors' justice here, a dimension of which is the cleansing of the winners' history.
Without excusing the Holocaust, intended enslavement of the Slavs, and massacre of the Roma, homosexuals, and mentally ill, we need to consider the morality of Germany's neighbors.
How do we weigh the victimization of Germany by Versailles? What about Clemenceau, whose chauvinistic self-righteousness led to impossible reparations, devastated Germany, and caused much or most of the turmoil that made for the Nazi regime?
In an age when seizing territory was the goal, Imperial Britain owned a fourth of the earth. Its naval isolation of Germany meant the latter couldn't play the game without war.
Probably in the East.
Shouldn't Britain agonize a bit about this provocation, even as we all relish "Land of Hope and Glory?"
1
Add to that:
1) the fear of being sucked into an amorphous globalist black hole
2) the invigorating doctrines of LGBT and Climate gloom
3) EU paralysis
4) Man-in-charge-Putin with his back-to-War and Peace glamour. The European Right is an unabashed fifth Russian column. Europe is a ideological shell with nothing left to keep the old demons from crowding back in.
I spend a lot of time in Berlin and it is pretty clear that although Turks and people of Turkish descent make up a very large part of the population, they are still really not integrated even after decades. You might say this is because they have failed to integrate, but I think it's because integration is a two-way street and the Germans have done very little to integrate them and make them part of German society.
4
@Caroline You would be correct in that observation. The Turks were initially considered guest workers who would return home after the job was over (rebuilding after WWII), so there was no effort made to integrate them. It's happening, but slowly, slowly. The Merkel government took a different tack with the recent wave of Middle Eastern/African/Afghani immigrants and has made a huge effort to teach them German language and customs and integrate them. By and large that has made this group of immigrants much more successful.
3
"The passing of time doesn’t help, either. Today, millions of Germans were not even born when East Germany fell; to them, the Nazi era feels like ancient history. They struggle to see why they should identify Hitler’s barbarism with their lives. "
In this context, is the author advocating Inherited Sins on the newest generation of Germans? How should they identify with something they did not participate in and had no control over? Yes, the history should be taught and yes to be mindful of past mistakes is important. It's also important to diferentiate the new generations lack of blame from the old.
10
@ArthurinCali You missed the important message of this article: the hard right movement, the same one that gave rise to the Nazi's, is rearing its ugly head again.
10
Sorry, the truth is that history forms and informs. If the newest generation of Germans rejects their past then we as a world will be forced once again to live or die with the consequences of their "right" to forget. In the names of all of my family members who were murdered and abused, I say. "Never Forget"@ArthurinCali
8
@Nina
Yet in the article it is a given that the history is being taught. Where in my comment do I infer that it should be forgotten or not studied? To the point, new generations of a country do not and should not shoulder the burden of past generations mistakes.
At this time in America, we are continuously reminded of past misdeeds in our history and expected to "atone" for them as if we all collectively engaged in prior behaviors. I cannot agree with a sins of the father's logic being passed down through lineage.
History is the great arbitrator; and the Germans have embraced authoritarianism throughout history with predictable and often terrible results. One can prevaricate, highlight the rich culture, technological innovations, art, music; you name it. But sooner or later the national consciousness marches to the drum beat. History again; in recent generations--1870, 1914, 1939. Want to go back further? And there's no indication that it cannot repeat itself. Can the national impulse be attenuated? Who knows? But it needs to be recognized by German society and whomever else is in a position to be affected by the resurgence of German nationalism/militarism.
12
@Stu Reininger
Yes, I want to go back further, to 1848, when there was no "Germany," and there existed a patchwork of principalities throughout present day "Germany."
Prussia was but one principality that grew exponentially throughout the 19th century, it was the main motivating force in the unification of "the German states" and it is from where this"authoritarian" and "militaristic" impulse originated. So when you say "throughout" history but then cite but a limited timeline of 60-70 years, well there's a lot more to the story than that.
Like lets go way, Way, WAY back to the death of Charlemagne and the division of Western and Central Europe into three parts, given to his three sons. The one who got "the center" died early on, and the other two fought over this territory so they'd could the "greater" ruler. They both lost and their solution was to keep the center splintered, so it wouldn't coalesce into a entity that threatened either of their Eastern or Western territories. This arrangement held for centuries, through The Reformation and religious wars, through Napoleon, The Hapsburgs, until the Hohenzollerns finally unified the center, under Prussia, and so there you have it. It took centuries to create that threat and a viable threat they were, winning in 1870, losing in 1918, and losing bigtime in 1945. BUT this authoritarian / militaristic impulse has only become an existential threat within the last 150 years.
4
@Stu Reininger The problem of fascism and totalitarianism is a human and regrettably universal one. People everywhere and at any time can and do fall victim to such mindset. Looking at the U.S. and its current leadership, I would not be too confident about that Shining City on the Hill right now. As long as authors of articles like this one look at fascism and right-wing extremism primarily through a "German" lens (as in: What is happening in Germany) it is easily overlooked that the same mechanisms of 1933 etc. are at work in other countries as well. As someone who moved to Berlin just 3 years ago from the U.S., I am proud to live here, proud of people speaking their minds and standing up to these right-wing movements currently going on all around the world. 240,000 demonstrators last fall in this city alone standing up against racism - that says something. Where are those rallies in the U.S.?
16
This is similar in some ways to what we see here in USA. the south lost the civil war, but that does not mean the losers changed their ideology. Racist and white nationalist ideas go underground for a while but resurface sooner or later and catch on. the poor feel left out and explioted, as indeed they wireman are, but they really do not understand by whom. those same elite class exploit this anger by pointing fingers - be it as the jews and in Russia and Europe, blacks and latinos etc....the "other". But in fact, until rampant out of control multi national capitalism is brought under control and balanced with social needs and real education and deomcratic participation, the world with , yet again face the rise of facist oriented leaders with a loyal and outraged fan base.
1
Unfortunately the undercurrent of German resentment and antisemitism was always there, and recently just started bubbling to the surface. In my experience it only took some alcohol to have apparently perfectly reasonable Teutons turn into bitter nationalists and, often, paranoid antisemites.
The German leadership and official policies are admirable. But I truly fear for the future.
1
There's something very odd about the cult of Hitler and the Nazis among the far right around the world. Yes, we all ought to be so appalled by the crimes that Hitler ordered and inspired that we should never admire him, but unfortunately humans seem to be very good at admiring bloody crimes. Supposedly, though, we admire success. Yet Hitler was the greatest loser in history. He left Germany in ruins, its citizens exposed to its enemies, its territory either annexed by other countries or divided into occupation zones, its people starving or nearly so and reduced to the most desperate measures to survive. Far from providing Germany with new "living space", his actions led to the expulsion of long-established ethnic German communities from large areas of central and eastern Europe. Yet Hitler is a fetish among people who talk as if they'd like to do it all over again. I'd say "What are they thinking?" but clearly they're not thinking (not if the definition of thinking involves any degree of analysis), they're just relieving their hormones. Because, if they could try to do it all again, they'd just lead their own cause to a new catastrophe, aside from the horrific crimes that they'd commit.
2
Shaming and punishment are how you deter naughty children from misbehaving, they don't do much to persuade true believers from their cause. The Neo-Nazis of today have an almost religious devotion to that ideology. Its long dead leaders are practically sainted martyrs, honored with icons and relics. The fervor of their devotion is immune to criticism and censure.
I don't believe the campaign of public condemnation and political persecution was intended to persuade these people, away from their beliefs, I think it was meant to keep them isolated. While shaming and condemnation won't turn a true believer it will keep more fickle, "fair weather fascists" from joining up, and also sour the general public on their ideology. For this reason the steady drumbeat of Holocaust remembrance has been the tempo of the last 70-odd years.
But while free society has focused on history lessons and maintaining the same, constant message, fascists have been adapting to the modern world, retooling their ideas as solutions to modern problems: immigration, inequality, terrorism, etc. That's how they're getting people to pay attention. They don't lead with the Neo-Nazi religion, it isn't even necessary to convert all their followers to it as long as they endorse the broad policies being pushed.
The vast majority of Germans weren't members of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, but they supported their policies, either directly or tacitly. That's all fascists require.
Please note that the antisemitic acts of violence are mostly conducted by muslim immigrants, and that there is a strong correlation between (illegal) muslim immigrants and the rise of antisemitism, so are violence crimes and sexual assault by them (they are overrepresented times 3.6 on average compared to their population share).
The right wing actually opposes those migrants and migration handling in Germany mainly, which the left-wing condems as being neo-fascist.
1
Wondering how living under an ongoing totalitarian regime as affected the views of the East German population. I also wonder about the decline of religious practice on the culture. Imperfect, flawed, and open to all the critique that may be directed, nonetheless the best of religious traditions bring forth and seed people and culture with positive moral codes and disciplines (love thy neighbor, welcome the stranger, practice charity) that secular culture does not.
11
After the reunification, what was East Germany had much better gender equality than the west.
I also find the suggestion that religion is necessary for morality offensive as an atheist. Some of the most ethical people (and societies) I can think of are atheist, and some of the absolute worst are religious. I want to shout it from the mountaintops: religion is NOT necessary for ethics!
14
@Horsepower: According to your logic then, anyone who is secular and does not adhere to any particular religion lacks a moral code and disciplines (whatever that means). And accordingly, US Americans (much less secular than Germans) should be the epitome of morality and welcome strangers with open arms. Hmmmm....
9
@Horsepower...I wouldn’t be too sure about your closing statement. We have a strong religious culture in this country, embraced by many of our government leaders, that stands firmly opposed to those qualities you describe. Which proves that even God can be corrupted for political opportunism.
51
Germany confronted its past more than any other nation - Japan, Turkey, US have failed to do so. It is therefore disconcerting that even there the lessons are not effectively transmitted down just 70 years later. As far as Jews go, clearly they require a homeland to be safe.
4
There was, though, a deep shame that was (rightly) imposed by the world on the entire German nation after the War, a burden that I had believed was assumed by the next generation. Merkel did personify this guilt, for example. I hadn't realized that this burden had also created feelings of self-pity amongst the less enlightened. I had also believed that Germany was currently more successful at combating fascist propaganda than it apparently is. The West - as a whole - needs to work together to develop strategies to combat Russian disinformation campaigns that are dangerously destabilizing. White supremacist news outlets - FOX included - need to be held to higher journalistic standards. Importantly, the horrors of WW2 must be taught in schools everywhere.
1
"Learning from history, it seems, is an exercise in democracy that can never stop."
4
Not only Germans seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past - so also Israelis seem to have done.
"Popular TV shows and best sellers set in the Nazi era treat Germans as victims, not perpetrators. At the same time, 40 percent of young Germans say they know very little or nothing about the Holocaust."
This is how things start, with erasure (or reinvention) of the past. Few will take the time to learn why they should remember, and where their country might be headed if they're not careful.
Throughout history, we read of revisionist history normally thought of as confined to Communist nations. That it's happening in the liberated Germany finally coming to grips with its past makes it even more chilling.
There's a huge difference between revisionism and nostalgia. The latter informs the former, because it takes both to establish the unthinkable and unacceptable: forgetting one's past which leads to repeating it.
11
@christineMcM I watch a lot of German tv and read a lot of German novels, and I have yet to come across anything that treats the Nazi era sympathetically.
Is America about to forget the lessons of Nazi Germany?
4
Nazis, Nazis everywhere. White supremacists everywhere.
If people deign to disagree with you politically, just call them a Nazi. Racist also is a wonderful argument ender for when you have no logical argument.
Disagree with the left’s open borders nonsense and you are a racist Nazi.
1
Had we learnt from history, the world would be a different place now. But history keeps repeating itself.
Why single out Germany? What's happening in our own backyard in America not very different.
6
How long is a nation supposed to be sorry for past political mistakes--as long as it keeps paying for others to keep reviving the issue? Modern Germans are not guilty of their great-grandparents' failings, they should stop paying to mollify their critics. WWII is over except in the thoughts, words, and actions of those who feel they continue to benefit politically and financially from its posthumous prolongation.
1
Germany did far more to combat racism after world war 2 than the us did in reconstruction.
3
Look who's back!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4176826/
A wonderfully ironic comedy about the subject.
The title should read "Has the world forgotten the lessons of the Nazis". Unfortunately history tells us another evil empire shall show itself at some point in the not to distant future.
Given the often tacit, sometimes overt expressions of bigotry coming from the highest levels of the U.S. government, the rise in hate crimes and mass shootings, groups shamelessly traveling through rural America to "educate" residents about the "dangers" of Muslim and Latino immigrants, and regular armies of trolls seeking to foment these prejudices online, this op-ed feels like "whatabout-ism."
1
What have we learned?
Those who forget, are doomed to repeat.
When capitalism is broken by policy that assures protections of the rich at all costs, it opens the door to reflexive scapegoating and fascist thought. When people are left helpless to fight against policies that unfairly move all wealth and power to an elite class, they take it out on those who cannot defend themselves. The bullied and disenfranchised become the bullies and turn their anger to those that are historically, easy targets. Until we fix capitalism, this will continue.
It is not just the right who has made this happen. The left,(see the Clinton's), have facilitated the transfer of wealth to only a few with complicit policies and a lack of effort to truly protect the masses from those who would see us lose our power as voters. They have failed us along with the press, and allowed the right to control the narrative.
5
"Germany is facing what was once thought impossible: ... a proliferation of hard-right movements and clusters" - And why do you think that is? Could the uncontrolled migration of people who blatantly refuse to adapt and integrate, and also cause crime, have something to do with it? "In surveys, ever more say they desire an authoritarian leader and distrust liberal democracy" - Of course. Merkel's radical decisions on immigration have roiled the country, causing strife. Even Hillary Clinton admitted in 2017 that too much immigration without assimilation "roils the body politic." "In my neighborhood in Berlin, and others across the country, people wearing Jewish headgear are harassed on the street." - Are they harassed by actual white Germans, or Muslim immigrants? More information please.
1
It's more likely that they are tired of being lectured to about the sins of the their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. While some are still alive today, they are vanishing. The sins of the fathers have nothing to do with the guilt of the children. And what the children DO care about is THEIR INTERESTS, not the collective guilt of the "German people".
2
Having lived in D for many years, married to a German; experiencing life from the inside of the culture, this article is a vast and dangerously misleading generalization. The turks were all welcome WHEN THEY WANTED TO BE, and the Holocaust was broadly winced against with all the pain that is expressed elsewhere. Otherwise in re AfD and EU failings, well, follow the inevitabilities of a capitalist system that pervade. Especially in the USA. Quite inaccurate to single out the Germans. It may be the author is he who cannot move on into a future of some optimism.
2
I knew a professor of sociology who had this fairly intriguing argument that the single greatest failing of society that brought about the emergence of the Nazis was the prevalence of peasant inbreeding that had been going on for x-hundreds of years. Then effective techniques of early 20th century mass media made it easy to disseminate ideas into those parts of the population susceptible to messages amenable to idiosyncratic tendensies of a collective character subset, numerous enough at that time to affect a general tipping point.
So if they can keep the fokking to bloodlines at a safe remove from one another the problem probably won't re-emerge...
1
So German citizens can't oppose crazy insane immigration policies bringing millions of migrants escaping war in the Middle East without being called racist?. Opposing that unwanted and impossible immigration should be opposed - freely else are we not a Democracy?. Israel has very wicked policies against the Palestinians where they daily are expanding or building new settlements throughout the occupied territories and Bibi has said he will not give back 1 inch in his campaign to get re-elected. Now we can't oppose those policies without being called 'anti-Semite'?. The EU is very generous in dealing with the refugees but there is a breaking point of financial burden and anti-assimilation concerns fired up with uptick in crimes by some of the them. We the citizens of EU countries have a right to object without smears and innuendos spread by opponents and fear mongers.
1
Some of you probably remember this: "This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been a real life, you would have been given instructions on where to go and what to do." Many people, throughout the world, in the face of the current climate situation, are now thirsting for those instructions. There are charlatans everywhere willing to supply them.
8
From the article: "In surveys, ever more say they desire an authoritarian leader and distrust liberal democracy."
Wow. This is disturbing. As that old saying goes about those who don't study history tend to repeat it.
There must be something deep with the human psyche, that fosters this type of thinking. Because it goes across many different cultures.
WWI, was called the war to end all wars-- because it was pretty much just one, big, senseless slaughter-- and we see how that worked out...
5
As an immigrant to the US from Germany, born 1943, I too see current developments in Germany with some trepidation. I was a member of the first post-war generation, where the theme in my last year of high school was "this must never happen again", and every Friday afternoon for the last year we were shown documentaries made by the Nazi's themselves about their "final solution". Ironically, some of the older teachers were still steeped in Nazi myths. For example, our Biology teacher taught us that "mixes marriages" only produce offspring with the worst characteristics of both partners - and for him a "mixed marriage" was, for example, between a German man and a French woman!
Reunification was a mixed blessing, as Mr. Hockenos points out: East Germans never went through the education process of West Germany, which focused on German guilt - they were taught that they were guiltless. And much of the new nationalism is concentrated in the eastern states.
However, I am less pessimistic than Mr. Hockenos. The AfD, like the "Republikaner" before them, will self-destruct and fade - Germany does have strong anti-Nazi strictures in its "Grundgesetz" and its laws. The new nationalism is a world-wide phenomenon, which will fade again, hopefully before a huge cataclysm.
And Germany still has a comparatively good record of dealing with its past. Even the US has not dealt with all of its past demons - Native-American genocide, Japanese internments, even still anti-Black racism.
4
While I agree with many of the troubling questions raised in this piece, I dislike the headline and miss an important observation. The headline should have read " ...learn from the Nazi Era". We have enough people of various motivations who now apply the lessons of Nazis, such as xenophobia, racism and singling out easily identifiable minorities to appeal to lower instincts. Trump and his tweeting about Ilhan Omar and Murdoch's Post running with it are examples. What's missing from this piece is an important example for how an incomplete or absent processing of past racism and racist crimes can poison the well for an entire country: the aftermath of the Civil War here in the US. People like Robert E. Lee who broke their oath and then attacked the country they had sworn allegiance to (the US) were traitors and terrorists, but were and are revered as heroes. The legend that the South attacked the Union to "defend States rights", and not because they wanted to continue slavery, was and is often left unchallenged. Much of that is due to the abortive stop of Reconstruction and the resurgence of racist ideology soon after the end of the Civil War.
Germany, the subject of this Opinion piece, would do well to think of more and better ways to continue to demystify what the Nazi ideology was really about: racism, disregard for human rights, and appealing to the lowest instincts. Letting your guards down too soon can have long-lasting consequences!
3
The EU concept of open borders has caused more problems than its worth. It gives the intolerant among them the excuse to display their vitriol. The AfD has its equivalent in most European countries and elsewhere in this world. Ignorance outlasts memory.
3
I had a friend whose German mother had been married to a Nazi soldier during WW2, and after the war she married an American soldier and came with him to live in the U.S. This woman was referring one day to a young woman she had just met, and said, "She looks like a person should look, with the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Very correct!"
2
Considering that a third of Americans think that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, then it's not surprising there is any confabulating of something as long ago as World War II.
1
I see many Germans critique AfD and PEGIDA. Those who like the xenophobic attitudes are generally poor, pathetic East German men who have not progressed into modern society. Much like the Nazi culture here in the US.
5
What would you expect from a country, the primary cause in two World Wars? From behind closed doors the whispers become a roar.
1
@David J
what a crude generalization. The equivalent would be to call the citizens of the US to be all greedy capitalists and racists.
My first thought -- at least they had a culture of remembrance.
How often are we reminded of the Native Americans we exterminated? As a child I never went to a memorial for the hundreds of thousands or more slaughtered Indians.
As I stood on the grounds of Auschwitz in October 2018 my country was separating babies and children from immigrant families crossing our southern border. China was separating Muslim families and putting adults in camps and there was no outcry from world leaders.
We stand by Israel no matter what they do, even though they once again elected a criminal as their leader. Netanyahu is just as right wing hateful as our own president and even Democrats don't dare to call Netanyahu out.
I think Germans are reminded all the time about their past, more than most who have committed atrocities and that's not unwarranted, but like most of the world today, politicians everywhere seem to be winning with fear and hate. Blaming poor and powerless immigrants seems to be the winning theme these days.
Germany is not alone and it's not fair to call them out as if they are -- Hungary, Poland, England, Italy, America -- fear and hate are being driven by politicians. The whole world should remember the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the colonization of the Americas, the Rwandan genocide, Armenian genocide... and think about this road we seem to heading down together ..not just Germany.
4
Antisemitism is spreading. The world doesn't like what Netanyahu and the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinian people.
So better to understand the Jewish dilemma.
Jews of the world are split about which decision to make
.
The two sides:----
Some say "What we are doing is wrong. We are creating more antisemitism because of our treatment of the Palestinians and we are causing more enemies around the world" !
The other half of the world's Jews say ----
"We have always been plagued with antisemitism all throughout history so don't count on the world to suddenly become friendly and nice , no matter what we do. Better to have a homeland (Israel )and fight for it because
there will always be trouble for us with more antisemitism ahead. Don't try to please the world, it's more important that we have a place to go for safety when the trouble starts and it will start no matter whom we choose to please."
Those are the two sides for today's jews.
Which of the two sides is right, is the real question of the day.
Maybe the Jews of the world have become too cynical, but it's not hard to understand why they might have become this way.
1
I don't know where the author lives, but the very dark picture he paints doesn't reflect the Germany I live in. To answer the rhetorical question: I, for one, don't believe "Germany" - though I use the collective with caution - has forgotten the lessons of Nazism and I trust in a thinking, caring majority of Germans to keep those lessons alive. I am not German, but I live here, and so I take it upon myself to play my part.
Indeed there are problems here, new and old, in respect to racism, anti-semitism, changing demographics, etc., and exacerbated by a political system under stress (but not in turmoil like elsewhere!) and the (global) rise of nationalism and populism. But compared to some of the actions and rhetoric to be heard, not to mention electoral decisions made, on the other side (or this side, depending upon your point of view) of the Atlantic, and elsewhere in Europe, Germany is weathering the storm pretty well.
I would suggest that whilst they may well indeed be inter-related it is not wise in one small article to throw together all the complexities of race, history, politics, geography, economics (was anything left out?) and attempt to present a coherent argument or, in this case, frame a question.
And, yes, there are people in Germany who are uninformed, misinformed, ignorant, xenophobic and just plain not very nice. Again, where do you live? Any different? Me thinks not.
5
Sure As Hell Looks Like They Have Been Becoming Nazis for at least a decade or so.
We have entered a new Dark Age in which Trump is largely to blame for its rapidly increasing presence.
1
@Mark Shyres
Stereotyping is alive and well. Nothing like painting a country of over 80 million with the same brush. I saw a Norwegian steal a loaf of bread therefore all Norwegians must be thieves.
@Dart
Germany has always been a hotbed of xenophobia and the far right. Some have simply been too slow to recognize it for what it was and still is.
1
One small nuance: AfD was founded three generations after WWII because they recognized that some people did something and that all Germans had lost access to their civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech, and the right to criticize recent German and European policy.
27
@c-bone
Whaaaat? Since when have Germans lost their access to civil liberties and freedom of speech, plus the right to criticize recent German and European policy?
Maybe you can't find Germany on the map and confuse it with Hungary, Poland and the European part of Turkey.
108
@c-bone What you say sounds more like an AfD campaign. In Germany it is there that freedom of speech and human rights are exemplary. Sure, there are some deficits that are often denounced by right-wing parties. And yes, even the right-wing parties often complain about the wrong policies of the government and the EU. The majority of the German population, however, does not see it that way. Look at the last election results. You will notice that the majority of people here in Germany (more than 80%) did not vote for the AfD. Recent surveys confirm that.
13
@c-bone
"...all Germans had lost access to their civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech..."
I'll respond further when I stop laughing.
12
Apropos efforts undertaken to purge the ranks of Party members in the new Federal Republic, as I describe in my new book (https://cup.columbia.edu/…/nostalgia-for-the-…/9783838212814), the denazification of artists who collaborated with the Hitler dictatorship was farcical and thus led to the dominant presence of regime-friendly artists in West German cultural institutions during the first few decades of the postwar era.
The Holocaust was not perpetrated in America by Americans against other Americans.
The Holocaust was not perpetrated in Europe by Arab, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish Muslims.
The Japanese Empire did not kill 30 million Chinese because they were Jewish.
The Japanese Empire did not invade Southeast Asia and the Indo-Malaya and the South Pacific because of Jews.
Nazi Germany did not kill 27.5 million Soviet citizens because they were Jewish.
Only one holocaust is the Holocaust. Not Rwanda nor Darfur.
5
@Blackmamba
Well said, Blackmamba !
Unfortunately your poignant and appropriate comment will not fit on a bumpersticker, so is likely to get few Recommends.
2
The current top Reader Pick says, "Well, the obvious question is, has America forgotten the history of Germany? Seems like our current situation is an eerie repetition of events almost a century ago."
I can't help but wonder if the author and those who recommend the comment are themselves aware of German and American history. There simply is no similarity between German and American history. Germany post World War I was an economic wasteland. The U.S. is not. Nazi Germany made the annihilation of massive groups of people (e.g. Jews, Roma, gays, etc.) an end in itself, not a means. The U.S. at its worst removed, enslaved, and killed people for economic reasons, a means to an end. Germany did not become a country until 1871, after a semi-imperialist conquest by Prussia. The U.S. was formed a century earlier by the voluntary coming together of independent British colonies. One could go on...........
2
Generations brought up in governments with institutions that promote education, equal rights, human rights do not need museums and reminders of atrocities. We are all aware of what humans are capable of when their leaders stop policing and enforcing laws that regulate humans extreme behaviors.
Sons should not pay for the sins of their fathers.
Germans compare to other Europeans and Americans have less tolerance of extremism and thrive in diversity. A very youthful city Berlin proves to all that hatred and racism is very much in the minds of the conservative older generation.
4
About a year ago when the AfD made a big show in the German elections, I asked a German colleague about it.
He's 50 years old, a PhD biologist, well traveled, sophisticated, an American citizen now who votes Democrat. He stated that growing up German you were taught to feel personal guilt for the Holocaust, guilty for the sin of being born German, ten, twenty or more years after the fact.
And when he goes back to Germany every couple of years he's astonished at how "un-German" Germany is becoming. By that he means the waves of immigrants from the Middle East and elsewhere transforming his country demographically and culturally, including the small northern town he grew up in which he said has become "unrecognizable."
And to voice concern or resentment about how rapidly this massive demographic and cultural shift is occuring is verboten: you are instantly demonized as a hater, a bigot.
Sound familiar?
Where are the white males who are supposed to apologize for the sin of being white and male going to go? Where are those who can't honestly discuss the downsides of massive immigration going to go when they are denounced reflexively as "bigots!" at the hands of the so-called liberals who dominate our culture and national conversation?
Into the arms of AfD in Germany. Into the arms of Trump in the US.
2
It seems that in so many democracies around the world, about 40% of the population (majority of them being men) support hatred of the 'other' and will actively work to suppress and hurt the 'other' and will follow leaders (such as Trump) who encourage violence against the 'other'.
40%. I'm curious as to why. Is it something in our brains? Does the reptillian part of our brain fire up more in some people and the frontal cortex light up in others on a predominant basis?
It definitely seems to be a growing, world-wide phenomenon. Scary. Because if it's everywhere, in every population, there's no place to escape it. I used to want my one and only child to leave here and live in Germany. I want her safe as she is non-mainstream and Trump's hate wants to punish. It seems it demands he punish the 'other'.
Oh, to be consumed by hatred. Why are we accepting this in our president? He's a role model for every goon in the world.
6
It seems some people are born with a significant tendency to racism and xenophobia.
We do not have to look only at Germany with askance. Trump has a hard core of at least 35% approval despite his racist and xenophobic rants and policies. "His people" are not swayed or convinced by him. They were that way before Trump emerged on the national scene. They have been waiting for a long time for a candidate that says out loud what they have been thinking all of their lives.
And they have found a party that has been transformed from subtle appeals to racism and xenophobia to to a party that proudly and loudly proclaims allegiance to those ideas.
They have become increasingly concentrated in rural and small town America because young people who leave for college never come back because they have found not only work in the metro areas but also tolerance.
The 2020 election will show if tolerance or fear of the other will prevail.
12
A disheartening but not surprising read. I appreciate the nuance of the article and, as a German-American who grew up in West Berlin in the 70s and 80s, I can personally attest to aspects of Vergangenheitsbewältigung Mr. Hockenos mentions: History class included the showing of American newsreels featuring mounds of corpses at liberated concentration camps and visits to nearby concentration camps. German TV had a show called "Vor Vierzig Jahren" ("40 years ago") that paired Nazi propaganda with commentary and analytical dissection. It was part of upbringing at home. There was no doubt in my mind and those of my classmates what happened and who did it. Fascism was evil. Period. I haven't lived in Germany in more than two decades, but have visited frequently. I can't say that I have noticed any broad shift towards nationalism or right-wing ideologies in the circles I frequent, but it's clear that one of the unforeseen costs of unification was that some of the energies once focused on the "Erinnerungskultur" ("culture of remembrance") had to go towards unifying a people with very different understandings of life, society and the dark sides of Germany's past. Add to that the stresses that came with globalization and the immigration wave of 2015 and the list of worrying trends noted in the article don't come as a shock. It is now up to Germans of my generation (the Gen Xers), less removed from World War Two, to take up the task of remembering and saying "never again".
3
Anyone else get the idea that capitalism has just exhausted people? Not that the alternatives worked out so great. But it seems like the constant scramble leaves people too wiped out to do the work of participatory democracy. "Just gimme an iron-fisted ruler and someone else to blame. I'll be watching TV."
10
@Diego You could be correct. I also believe a large part of the economic exhaustion that has contributed to this malaise and neo-Nazism resurgence is that the rise of robotics in manufacturing has made many people redundant and there are fewer or no jobs for those people who once did that type of work. Improvements in workplace efficiency/productivity have not been equitably shared with the workforce and retraining is often too much for the demographic being required to undergo it. Everyone is NOT brilliant, flexible or re-trainable. Those that find themselves unable to make the transition become resentful of what has happened to them and they begin to strike out at anyone they perceive as undercutting them. Underlying racism and bigotry resurfaces quickly and virulently in that situation.
1
As Israel insists on its identity as a Jewish state and provides non-Jews with fewer rights than Jews, it's difficult to separate the Jewish state from Jews in general.
As an American Jew, I would loath to live in the Christian state that many right wingers want to create in the US. Any religious state is inherently unfair to people who do not share the state religion, and even to people who do not share the particular sub-sect of the religious leaders who govern the state.
As long as governments are guided by power and wealth of a few instead of justice, there will be demagogues blaming the weak for the sins of the strong.
3
Of course, the real question is: Have we?
1
The author is naive. Like most of us he is incapable of comprehending the barbaric criminal mind that lurks in ~30% of any population, and not unique to Germans.
We have the same ~30% here in the US. The same beasts are in Bolivia, South Africa, Russia and Iran. The only thing that separates the racist in California from the racist is China is miles. They are the most aggressive among us, kept in check only by the thin veneer of civilizations's check and balances.
Antisemitism is again on the rise spiraling across borders sped up by a shrinking world as a result of the technology's globalization affects. The antisemitic in France now can hook up with kindred spirits in Hawaii day and night.
What trump is doing to our brown skinned brethren is no different than what hitler stirred up. The issue is dominance, a hunger for power. Scapegoating a minority is just a lever in the toolbox. a war on humanity that requires an enemy. Jews work. So do Muslims or Puerto Ricans.
Without a rigid, statutory intolerance for any expression of racism this disease will fester and spread just as it always has. This is a job for the meek.
2
While any country can devolve into allowing a Hitler to become leader, Germany is unlikely to do so.
There is no guarantee but any country that has a history of democracy (West Germany since 1945) is less likely to do so.
It is more likely and has gone in that direction with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Venz. etc. with no history of a stable democracy.
For all its faults and some of them horrible ones, America has set the modern standard with app. 250 yrs. of democracy.
1
What I am about to say is not an attempt to demean or underestimate the good work put forward by individuals and organizations to counter Racism, Nazism, Xenophobia, etc. throughout human history.
However, over the arc of history, I have seen no evidence that human beings are fundamentally capable individually or collectively of learning from the mistakes of history. Sadly, within human nature there is a tendency to inflict cruelty where it can do so without obvious consequences.
But the supreme irony- full as it is of religious and spiritual implications- is that no ill deed is without lasting effect. Propagated through endless generations- the amassed evils and caused harms of mankind create a kind of stranglehold on future generations. This is as true for individuals and families as it is for the general society. And this is indeed tragic and causes us to face the age hold question of free will.
Yet, the hope, expressed as it is in so many ways, is two fold in nature. First, much of the suffering in the world is self-imposed and therefore unnecessary and Second, we are always confronted by moral choices that give us at least the possibility of righting past wrongs and creating a better future. And perhaps a Third- some individuals do learn from their mistakes- not because of the cudgel of fate and consequence bearing down upon them, but out of moral choice without necessity. And therein lies hope.
34
@Lowell Greenberg. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it.
3
@Lowell Greenberg
Our situation may be worse than your comment implies: What if we don't have free will and are but the puppets to our nature -- an animal with a big brain that gets us what we want and can usually justify the means or, at least, ignore the guilt?
(For a good, short read on determinism, I recommend Sam Harris's "Free Will." I bought mine on NOOK; Amazon has it, too, for $6.60.)
Of course, if we don't have free will, we neither deserve credit nor blame for whatever we do, good or bad. Which I think is the case. And it doesn't mean that we stop punishing criminals or rewarding good guys: We are shaping behavior by so doing, and it works gangbusters (cf. behaviorism).
There is so much wrong with this piece of selective facts and incorrect analysis that space doesn't allow an adequate response. The readers deserve a contextual discussion placing the events in Germany within the rise of nationalism and the degradation of support for the center-left and center-right parties throughout Europe.
Then you also need a better analysis of the economic effects of unification on the citizens of the former Communist zone. Germany's version of a rust belt in places. Ignored by this author is the fact that the Left and hard Left (anarchists, Marxists, and other shades of radical thinking) in Germany are still able to mobilize far larger street numbers than the far right.
Yes the AfD party merits concern. But I'd worry more about American and other big money financing persons roaming about Europe supporting nationalist and rightist agitation and politics outside Germany. Like Bannon's project to topple the Pope for example.
56
As someone who also lives in a Berlin neighborhood, and has for 40 years, I can only agree that this author just wants to push buttons and get his name in the NYT. Selective facts, bundling and total ignorance of the overall world policitcal climate. Hate speech is illegal here, and gets punished. Let’s start and stop there.
4
Great summary of a maze of factors. One factor deserves more emphasis: group-think is deep-seated in German culture, and the effort to purge the origins of Nazism became its leading theme, giving rise to a German version of what Americans call “political correctness”. This German PC shapes feelings and discussion now. For example, centrists who want to discuss immigration problems are immediately called Nazis by their neighbors, there are no centrist parties offering alternative ideas about immigration, and the media don’t offer any outlet either. People are forced to one extreme or the other. Guess what happens!
This is completely over the top. Certainly distance blurs memories but taking AfD as omen some serious revival of neo Nazism in Germany is ludicrous. They got 14% of the vote in the last election. What percentage of the vote is taken by the Republican party in the US which espouses broadly similar nationalist and nativist ideas?
195
@John, I agree that this is over the top. But this is what the NYT likes to print about Germany. Recent reports indicate that popular support for the AfD is slipping (currently at 12%) and that the public is not ready for Merkel to step down. Jews are in fact returning to Germany, in particular through reclaimed citizenship. Check out the BBC's 'Heart and Soul' radio documentary on this topic from a few days ago. It will give you a better idea of what life is really like here, especially for the Jewish population.
15
@Donna Swarthout
I agree.
3
@John
Still, don't forget that Hitler started in a beer hall with a group small enough to fit around a table.
15
My father, a graduate of Buchenwald, loved Germany. The books, the music, the art, the universities, the inventiveness, industriousness and work ethic of the people. His explanation for what happened to him there was simple, and as far as I know hasn't been improved upon: "Hitler made the country crazy."
If he was here today, he'd be saying the same thing about Trump.
5
The larger lesson that should be taken from the rise of the AFD is the comparison today to the period of post WWI Germany when the majority of Germans were near destitute while a few were seen as doing quite well, the only difference between now and then is this time around it’s trending global.
2
" And in the aftermath of the refugee crisis of 2015-16, many Germans — including mainstream, middle-class citizens — embraced the far right’s premises. In surveys, ever more say they desire an authoritarian leader and distrust liberal democracy".
Mr. Hockenos bases his opinion that in surveys, ever more [Germans] say they desire an "authoritarian leader" on one single survey by the former East German university of Leipzig that polled a meager 2,400 Germans.
It is well known that east Germans have voted for the arch-right xenophobic AfD - Alternative fuer Deutschland - in far larger numbers than those in , because the economy in the former DDR has still not caught up with the one in the former West Germany
Unfortunately too many in the east still think that there was more equality under the former communist Worker Paradise of the DDR compared to the former Federal Republic of Germany.
Compared to Germany, the danger of a far-right, xenophobic, autocratic government and a racist one based on white supremacy seems to be much more dangerous in the United States than in Germany as a whole.
8
I'm always against fascism, and there are signs we ought to be worried that history is repeating itself. Around the world liberal democracy is collapsing in on itself. I'm not sure it's strong enough to deal with the movement of peoples the world will be seeing in the next century.
At the same time, I have great sympathy for the German people who are seeing an unmanageable influx of foreign refugees and economic migrants, who want to benefit from Germany's welfare state and wealth, but who disdain its culture, its secularism, its mores. Just like our own humble TPS "migrants," none of it will be temporary. No one will ever want to return to Syria or Turkey when the comforts of Berlin or Hamburg are available.
Angela Merkel obviously has no concern for the obvious outcome: a huge influx of people with higher birthrates and an alien culture displacing the indigenous inhabitants, who have lower birthrates. That's not baseless racial anxiety - it's simple reality, and is another way history is repeating itself - this sort of displacement and change has happened throughout history, including in Eastern Europe - Poland, the Baltic, Prussia.
America is a bit different - we are a land of immigrants - we have a right to defend our borders and sovereignty, but we are not a fundamentally ethnic state. Germany, however, is the homeland of the Germans, just like Xinjiang is the homeland of the Uighurs. I understand the anxiety both groups feel toward those allowing their displacement.
31
@B Samuels Well, Germany isn't actually a single ethnic state. Although German is the common language, Germans lived in Poland, Russia, Romania, France, Czechoslovakia, etc. Not to mention Austria and Switzerland. Modern Germany has always been much more diverse than outsiders have given it credit for.
4
@B Samuels
"At the same time, I have great sympathy for the German people who are seeing an unmanageable influx of foreign refugees and economic migrants, who want to benefit from Germany's welfare state and wealth, but who disdain its culture, its secularism, its mores."
The influx of foreign refugees and economic migrants into Germany is not an influx of Jews, so how does this influx account for the "shocking rise of German ANTI-SEMITISM
and xenophobia ." ?!
Most Jews who I know, won't step foot in Germany , let alone move to Germany. Jews aren't displacing Germans, or taking their jobs, nor are Jews seeking out a welfare state in Germany. (or elsewhere )
2
@B Samuels
Agree, but not what many of the readers (and writers) of the Times want to hear.
Whenever a population is faced with rampant inequality, anger and resentment always follows. Throughout history, this resentment has often driven the people to blame the "Other" whether the other is the Jew or the Muslim or the foreigner in any garb.
"For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
Blaming the auslander is facile and less effective than working to raise everyone up. While economic inequality is most familiar, the future will have no shortage of inequalities as crops fail and potable water is increasingly scarce thanks to our willingness to cook the planet.
Being upset about others getting financial support is peanuts compared to the upheavals coming as others threaten our access to food and water.
"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin
The American Revolution will pale before the climate revolutions lapping at our shores with a rising sea level.
Germany and other rising populist forces are just the camel's nose under the tent flap.
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@Douglas McNeill I don't disagree with the sentiment or the analysis, but surely it's ironic to quote Benjamin Franklin in this context, given his attitude towards German imminigrants to the United States in his day?
Not much different here. Here, its Mexicans and Muslims. Not all Trump voters are racists but many are. Right wing racist resurgence is a problem not only in the U.S. and Germany but in Israel, France, the UK and Italy.
2
My father fought for the German army on the eastern front the last two years of WWII. He was drafted age 15, he was 17 when the war ended. My mom grew up in a communist household. Her dad, being a communist newspaper editor, was sent to the eastern front as punishment and died after being wounded. My mom served as a red cross nurse the last year of the war. My aunt, also a red cross nurse at the end of the war, was gang raped for 3 three days by Russian soldiers when Berlin finally fell. My grandfather on my dad’s side was deported to Russia after the war ended, never to be seen again. He was a mayor of a small town, not a soldier. One of my uncles, was captured as a POW on the eastern front and spend 10 years in a POW labor camp. He returned 1955.
The reason I am describing all this is simple. Germany is complicated. It has stood as the nexus of conflicting political and racial viewpoints for a long time. However, Germany has never stood alone as the extremist center. The recent rise of right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism is not a German thing, it’s a European thing, or even worldwide.
Why have things changed? Young people don’t feel responsible any longer, just like I don’t feel responsible for WWI or like most American kids don’t feel responsible for the systematic displacement and eradication of the Indian nations.
The old saying that time heals all wounds is true, but it also has the negative effect that it makes people forget what’s worth remembering.
19
@Brian Will
Thank you for injecting a much-needed element of actual history into this paranoiafest. The only "lesson of the Nazis" of relevance to us today was already known to Napoleon - do not invade Russia.
Anti-Semitism just will not go away and never will. Hatred of the other will not go away and never will. Blaming a religious minority which has zero influence in the scheme of things, for all of one's problems, just feels good I guess. However the people who hate have to realize that those they may hate are not playing the victim anymore.
3
How true and good starting basis for any discussion about Israel and religious bigotry.
No, Germany has not forgotten the effects of extremism. It appears that other countries have learned that it can be politically useful. Steven Miller of late advising with draconian border policies; Benjamin Netanyahu doing the same replete with walls to concentrate and punish Palestinians. The Germans had and have no corner of the market on it. Trump dances with Saudi princes who gave us 9/11 while Tweeting deliberate hate filled signals to his followers to get Representative Omar for the transgression.
Have the Turks forgotten Armenia? Have the Rwandans forgotten the Tutsi? Has Croatia forgotten Bosnia?
The list of countries is too long and the rest of the world too filled with the same behaviors for political, religious or economic gain to cite here.
30
Maybe the lesson here is to not tear down all those monuments to horrific parts of a country's history. Human memory is fragile, especially as generations lose personal connections to first person accounts.
Maybe this is what happens when you disallow publication of inflammatory rhetoric - either in print or on social media. While the words might incite those with a predisposition to hardline positions, it also allows thinking people to read the manifestos and better understand how hatefulness flourishes. We are only surprised by what we don't see coming.
The Nazis never disappeared nor did the Russian Politburo for that matter. They merely blended into society while maintaining their beliefs, waiting until the moment they once again could garner support; surviving to fight another day.
What's that well known saying about remembering the past or being doomed to repeat it? Sanitizing history because some individuals are 'triggered' by certain events is short sighted.
Someday, someone will have to acknowledge that taking in immigrants quickly with little vetting and no forceful cultural assimilation will cause a backlash. (European countries not being "nations of immigrants".) Someday, someone will have to acknowledge that taking in Muslims means importing fresh anti-Semitism. Someday, representative government will have to represent actual voters instead of whatever imagined altruism that government thinks is important to stuff down voters' throats. The moderates have no one to blame for the rise of nationalists but themselves.
5
Germany still seems far ahead of other countries though. For example, even though there’s been backlash to Muslim immigration, Germany did integrate Southern and Eastern Europe countries through the European Union and its free movement of goods and people, and there does not seem to be backlash against Polish immigrants the way there was in the UK. The result is that Southern and then Eastern European countries went from having Latin American living standards to almost-Western European ones in a generation, likely the greatest post-war economic feats outside East Asia (which were also aided by a guilt-ridden Japan).
By contrast, Americans would never allow EU-style free movement of goods and people with Mexico. There is no American guilt at invading Mexico the way there is German guilt at invading Poland, even though we held onto the territory we conquered and Germany had to give it back and then some. Reparations for slavery are opposed by the vast majority of Americans on the grounds that our country’s moral failings are erased with each generation, while Germans still paid World War I reparations in 2010, long after all the people responsible for that war were dead.
Germany is not perfect but its attitude towards its own history is something that should be emulated by people in all powerful nations.
78
I don't know about Germany, but America sure has.
7
During my years in Munich I met many good people who decried fascism but blamed the Holocaust on the victims of it for being unassimilated and not wanting to assimilate, for deliberately separating themselves from the dominant German culture. I found it disturbing that as soon as I mentioned that half my family died in Dachau, a twenty minute drive, the same people with whom I would discuss literature froze or simply stepped away. The rise in neofascism across Europe is one consequence of the EU, open borders being the most provocative and dangerous that has resulted in millions of refugees living in squalor in countries that can’t absorb them. Our home in Greece is an example.
16
@Naked In A Barrel
It seems ironic because in Germany, Jews were more assimilated than anywhere else in Europe, having abandoned Yiddish for German, traditional dress for modern dress, and saw themselves as Germans who happened to be Jewish. Politically, they ranged from very Conservative to Communist and everything in between (The German Communist Party was the only major Communist Party not affiliated with or under the control of Russia).
Even more ironically, is that it is the East German who refuse to assimilate, preferring the "völkisch" from the past to Federalism of the post-war era, the Federalism that made Germany into even more of an economic powerhouse, while at the same time a benign leader in the European Communities, then in the EU.
10
Most were children of the war whose parents suffered and so they tended to revise history, even hating the American reconstruction that taught them the evil of fascism. First American film after the war Broadway Melody of 1936 eg
Why is this comment a Times pick?
What's past is prologue.
Constant vigilance is necessary.
37
Many West German friends and acquaintances were far less sanguine about the re-unification than the Press made out.
They worried that East Germans, having lived under dictatorship from 1933 to 1990, nearly 60 years, whose last experience with Western Democracy and an open society was the brief Weimar Republic, would be totally thrown off by German Federalism, openness, and prosperity. They were right. Germany's economy slowed, assimilation of Western ideas was difficult, and many, many East Germans, as anticipated and witnessed to this very day, can't deal with it. Chancellor Merkel, herself an East German, is exceptional in that regard, and may well go down as one of Germany's truly greatest leaders going as far back as Frederick the Great and as far forward as Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl.
But Moscow has been quietly encouraging racism, anti-semitism, and tribalism (" völkisch" is the epitome of tribalism) as a way to rend the EU and NATO into many pieces...and it's working. In Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, France, Italy, Scandinavia, the UK, and even the Netherlands, not to mention non-European technically advanced nations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, of course, the United States.
But Putin couldn't disrupt "The West" if there weren't people willing to believe that somehow tribalism will save them and allow them to prosper. Even the President of the United States seems to believe this nonsense.
7
I don't know about Germany but for sure WE have, starting with our president.
2
The current top Reader Pick says, "Well, the obvious question is, has America forgotten the history of Germany? Seems like our current situation is an eerie repetition of events almost a century ago."
I can't help but wonder if the author and those who recommend the comment are themselves aware of German and American history. There simply is no similarity between German and American history.
Germany post World War I was an economic wasteland. The U.S. is not. Nazi Germany made the annihilation of massive groups of people (e.g. Jews, Roma, gays, etc.) an end in itself, not a means. The U.S. at its worst removed, enslaved, and killed people for economic reasons, a means to an end. Germany did not become a country until 1871, after a semi-imperialist conquest by Prussia. The U.S. was formed a century earlier by the voluntary coming together of independent British colonies. One could go on...........
So more readers may see it, I am reposting here Blackmamba's comment:
"The Holocaust was not perpetrated in America by Americans against other Americans.
The Holocaust was not perpetrated in Europe by Arab, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish Muslims.
The Japanese Empire did not kill 30 million Chinese because they were Jewish.
The Japanese Empire did not invade Southeast Asia and the Indo-Malaya and the South Pacific because of Jews.
Nazi Germany did not kill 27.5 million Soviet citizens because they were Jewish.
Only one holocaust is the Holocaust. Not Rwanda nor Darfur."
4
Apparently, they are forgetting.
The Germans should forever feel the guilt, be the kind and most gentle nation never paying attention to themselves but espousing the progressive and liberal attitudes, opening the door to whoever and from whenever feels threatened or endangered, and insist that others in Europe do the same. If not, then history teaches us that they are getting back to their bad and dangerous habits. And the neighbors too, in Eastern Europe, all those who dare having non-mondialistic opinion.
Texts as this one should and will make them 'forget' even more, and rightfully so.
3
Well, the obvious question is, has America forgotten the history of Germany? Seems like our current situation is an eerie repetition of events almost a century ago.
272
@Mark The article states "in parts of eastern Germany it is the most popular party. The AfD is riding a shocking rise of German anti-Semitism and xenophobia."
I was also struck with the parallels between the author's description of the lack of integration of eastern Germany into modern Germany and the lack of integration of the American south into the mainstream United States where racism and xenophobia are keys.
Germany should be thankful that in their case, a principal political party - such as the republicans in the case of the US - hasn't exacerbated the situation by pandering to it.
45
@Mark
So right, literally.
We have our own Arian white nationalists who have a so-called president who claimed “there are fine people on both sides”, even while one side chants “JEW WILL NEVER REPLACE US”.
Heil donnie. And Stephen miller self hating Jew.
17
@yeti00
“I was also struck with the parallels between the author's description of the lack of integration of eastern Germany into modern Germany and the lack of integration of the American south into the mainstream United States where racism and xenophobia are keys.”
I was struck by that also. Especially since I just recently read how after the Civil War former Confederate officers and government officials were soon back in Congress. In other words, people who were traitors to our government and committed treason went right back to running it after the war.
20
Horsepower, Sweden is considered by many sources to be the least religious country in the world, with the highest percentage of atheists. Their secular society has been, if anything, over-generous in accepting immigrants, and their social support society is a prime example of unselfish sharing among citizens. Their secular culture is doing just fine, thank you very much. Compare that to the lack of generosity among America's religious right that stands with their man, Trump. Sorry, but your comment is completely without justification.
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@Thomas Smith
He's responding to a commenter named "Horsepower." Good response, too.
2
@Patrick what has religion to do with racism or anti-ethnicity? Many very religious people are very anti immigration here. Sweden has less than 1% of muslims, Germany has 6+% of Muslims. The UK has 4.4%. Germany has the largest muslim population in the most densely populated country in the EU.
Muslims are expected to grow much faster than the rest of the population because of their high birthrate. In comparison to the US which has slightly over 1% of muslims.
Jewish people are 1.4% in Germany now vs 41% in the US. To put this into context. Germany is smaller area wise than Texas. Germany has almost 83 million citizens vs Texas with its 27 million.Yet anti-muslim and anti-jewish hatred is just as strong here even with a much larger area for immigrants. Yes I agree the AfD is dangerous. Our President here is spewing hatred and fear for minorities that is just as dangerous. I am Agnostic because I know from History that religion is causing so much hatred and wars. Especially the fundamentalists of all religions are dangerous with their call to go out and procreate. Religion is ok if you don't force it onto others and think a bit of this planet. Why are 2 children not enough? 4,5,6+ children was ok when the planet hat maybe a couple of million humans. The Planet does not increase in area just because we continue to overpopulate. We ought to take a brake. Are 7.4 Billion on this planet not enough??
2
@Patrick. I really think spell check is out to get us. HOWEVER I have never seen however rendered as horsepower.
3
“Among its errors, though, was the assumption that history could ever be “mastered” and the process wound down. Learning from history, it seems, is an exercise in democracy that can never stop.”
Here’s a lesson that applies to the United States every bit as much as any other country. Citizenship requires deliberate cultivation. We have largely given over cultivating citizenship to random chance. Little wonder that the citizenry is torpid and easily deceived.
3
About 40 years ago my husband and I visited Germany. He was attending a scientific meeting in Munich. I overheard a conversation one day, when some visitors like we were, were asking a native where Dachau concentration camp was. The citizen of Munich professed ignorance...had no idea where such a place was located even though Dachau is quite near Munich. The next morning I happened to be looking out our hotel window and I saw a group of people on motorcycles wearing swastika armbands. At that point, it was clear to me that Nazism was alive and well. I can't speak for the climate now, but back then it was enough to scare me and we immediately left what a few day before had been the beautiful city of Munich.
I see scary signs in our country now of how easy it is for a leader to incite crowds. When one praises the marchers in a far right display as "some very fine people" I think we have some serious problems brewing.
184
@joyce So you expect every German to have directions to all the concentration camps all the time? I'm German, I would not know, and frankly I would've been quite offended that a random tourist asked me this type of question. But I do know a lot ABOUT them, because we were taught about the Nazis and their crimes OVER and OVER again (starting in middle school). Which is part of the "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" explained in the article, and which I generally support.
Your other point as a bit of a smell to it. I find it extremely unlikely that you saw people with Swastika armbands just walking about. This sort of public display of Nazi symbols is not tolerated in Germany at all and is carrying hefty fines (think: thousands of Euros, or even imprisonment for up to 3 years for repeat offenders).
Curiously, since here in the US, where I live now, you got your total freedom of speech, you actually DO allow people walking about with Swastika armbands, Swastika flags, and given the Hitler salute in public.
44
@Hendrik F
(former and sometime New Yorker here)
So next time some daft tourist rudely asks - nay demands - of me, "which way is ground zero?" - I can tell them off, yeah?
Great. I've wanting to do that for SUCH a long time.
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@joyce
For an outsider to suddenly ask a German were Dachau is obviously is insulting at best and rightfully the cold shoulder was given. Is about the same as a European asking a Texas resident were you can view the dead-penalty prisons.
18
It would be wise to watch Ai Weiwei's documentary "Human Flow" about the mass migrations worldwide due to climate change, war, drought, etc. It is happening on a staggering scale and is truly a global crisis. If there only was a way to create empathy for the desperate people who can no longer live where they were born so that we could work toward solutions on integrating people into new communities.
4
Antisemitism was not promoted by the left during the Nazi era whereas today, some of the most virulent, not all, hatred comes from the left. There are many valid reasons to criticize Israel but the left has been targeting Israel disproportionately to other countries while giving a free pass to Palestinians, Arab countries and other international players.
Unlike other victims of racial hatred, Jews generally suffer less hardships because of their enormous efforts in the face of persecution, but for some reason they remain the most hated.
This Passover, Jews remind each other of this age old persecution as they appeal to God for the answer.
3
@Joe Waiting for an answer for millennium from an entity - maybe that entity is non-existent!
Dear Fellow Citizens of Our World,
This plea is addressed to everyone. Stop and think. They came for the Jews and enslaved them in ghettos. That was not evil enough. The Nazis took them to concentration camps and they never came home again. By the way it was not only Jews but other minorities as well.
My simple plea is we are all humans living on the same planet. Republicans I want to ask you all one question. If a decision was made to target bomb humans fleeing Central America, seeking asylum in the United States, would you support that? I fear we all know the answer and many would accept that as a realistic solution.
What does it take to realize evil when it is staring you in the face and to understand when fascism is taking hold all around you?
Janice
4
Have we?
The Nazi party was a blend of socialism and nationalism, to the extreme (of course they hated communists), which goes to show that any movement/ideology taken to the extreme will always ride on the misery/slavery of "others." Ergo, Venezuela today.
Not surprised that Nazi anti-Semitism hasn't died in Germany. Plus, it has become mainstream among many Muslim societies, to where, BTW, some Nazi criminals escaped and lived out there lives. While Muslim extremists existed in various countries for centuries, today's blend of anti-Jewish hatred, mixed with racial underpinnings, is even the shameless stock and trade of Malaysia's prime minister, who isn't censored internationally for his revolting remarks. Then, there is former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who prides himself for believing it is honorable to hate all Israeli Jews. Mix in a bit more poison, and voila, you've got Hamas with a British accent.
Has the world forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust? Only partially.
1
When the original Nazis were brought to justice they claimed that they were inspired in their anti-Semitism by an American, Henry Ford. The auto magnate published a newspaper and book that both took aim at the Jews. Perhaps contemporary German anti-Semitism is also being inspired by boisterous American leaders such as Ilhan Omar and her congressional enablers? Hate speech travels a long way.
If the Germans are in trouble, how much worse are we? I feel they have been exemplary in recognizing their moral failings compared to the rest of us. We just grabbed North America for our own. Treaty rights were never respected. 2/3 of children in Canada's Nunavut go to be d hungry to this day. In land set aside for First nations drinking water problems remain rife. First Nations childhood education gets about 2/3 of the funding of other Canadians. And the government of Ontario just cut the budget for First nations by a huge chunk. The premier is a Trump style figure who claims he leads Ontario's First Government for the People. Disgusting.
2
And if you think it's bad now, wait until the Gulf Stream collapses and the temperatures of northern Europe plummet, and climate change releases millions of desperate migrants from southeast Asia and Africa. Here's a Pew research quote:
"Between 2010 and 2016, the number of Muslims living in Germany rose from 3.3 million (4.1% of the population) to nearly 5 million (6.1%), while the rest of the population shrank modestly from 77.1 million to 76.5 million"
I can't really blame Germany for trying to keep their culture alive. If they fail, America will be able to get a lot of talented migrants.
1
Yes, immigrants trumpists will be happy to allow into the United States, on the basis of heritage and skin color.
Time is not a friend of historical lessons. How many people know anything about their grandparent's generation?
People forget. They are left with their selfish me-first tribal instinct to guide their action. Closing tribal ranks, nationalism and xenophobia are easy to promote & exploit, standard tools of authoritarian figures.
There is one surprising and astute observation, can't remember whether it was Martin Jacques or Khishore Mahbubani who said it: because China is not a western style democracy but under One-Party rule, it is in the ruling government's interest to cool down nationalistic sentiments to maintain stability, thus reduce the chance of over-reacting to outside xenophobia. China is facing increasing anti-China sentiment from USA and perhaps even Canada due to trade war and tariffs.
In other words: the lessons of the Nazis stand no chance of survival in democracies. The Alt-Right forces in Europe will continue to rise. The last piece of data: Finland.
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@Observer So what does all of this say about humankind? That we are but a bare step up from animals. And if we do not take care of our planet, we will not have much time to evolve, if ever.
2
Yes, the passage of time does in fact lead to people forgetting the crimes against humanity or at least minimizing those crimes. Presently, in the US there is a kind of "Vietnam revisionism" in which the horrors of what the US did there is being written over so as not to criticize the soldiers who fought there. And think of the present minimizing of 911 atrocities in which a Minnesota congresswoman, in describing the attacks uttered the phrase "Some people did something." If we, in this country can't agree that the loss of 3000 lives less than 20 years ago is a tragedy what chance is there that the memory of what happened 80 years ago will be retained?
2
Every time I watch as populist rabble-rousers incite their followers to acts of civil disobedience or violence, I see the makings of troubles ahead for our civilization.
We have all failed badly. We, via our elected leaders, did not ensure that all citizens felt they were valued parts of the societies in which they lived. In short, they feel taken advantage of. Accordingly, as they have almost no power over their leaders, they are offered proxy enemies, the immigrants, brown skinned people or other ethnic or religious minorities. They are rebelling in the only way offered to them by these cynical leaders, who stoke the flames, to avoid being blamed themselves for this sorry state of affairs.
That Teutonic racist tendencies are rising again is no surprise to me. As the article said, they never went away. It's just like the USA, where overt racism was unacceptable in public for a while, but definitely skulking around in the undergrowth. It's been simmering, angrily, waiting for the right time to show itself again. Now, under Trump, it can come out and try its luck again. These are not good times.
5
The writers of the NYTimes are out of touch with the reality of the immigrant surge in Europe.
I just returned from three weeks in Italy, if Italy is representative of Europe, and of what Europe will become, there is an emergenncy brewing.
Six years ago I also visited Italy, the difference in the population is overwhelming. Africans and Muslims now make up a significant percentage of the population, I saw this with my own eyes. Black vendors everywhere selling junk and generally pestering the tourists. Muslim women lying in the streets begging, literally they were lying in the streets.
This is not the Italy of six years ago !
This is not the Italy of thirty years ago !
Soon this will not be Italy as we know it !
So the NYTimes criticizes the German people for wanting Germany for Germans. Go there, look for yourself. The cultures are not compatible, this cannot and will not work. The people of Europe should put on their BIG BOY pants and kick these folks out now - before the die is cast and the Rubicon is crossed.
5
It behoves us all to remember the lessons of Nazi Germany no matter what country we happen to be born and live in. The rise of right wing and isolationist policies in the West, including my own country and perhaps more markedly in Trump's USA, is not a good thing as it is a self-perpetuating phenomena that encourages nationalism that so easily becomes racialism, persecution of minorities and those perceived to be different than ourselves. Nazi Germany's worst atrocities were only made possible by and with the consent of the people, at least until it was too late to do anything about it, we would do well to take that lesson to heart. Hitler was an insignificant corporal before he played on people's fears and baser instincts, today we are seeing something very similar happening in the USA with Trump's rabble rousing speeches and tweets; it is up to the people to either act to stop the country descending into the abyss that the Germany of the 1930s descended or to take action to prevent it.
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@Allsop
I beg to differ. America's foreign policy and the world could use a big, heaping helping of "isolationism."
@Allsop Amen!
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@Livonian
Oh, sure. That worked so well in the 1930's. From American isolationism to WWII is a straight path.
8
I don't think this is unique to Germany. All over the west, with Trump, Brexit, the yellow vest, the AfD etc. there is anger from people who have watched the elites create a world without a place for them.
Demonizing and othering these "canaries in the coal mine' instead of figuring out why they are angry helps the ugliest ideas spread.
Watch how Andrew Yang's alternative appeal of humanity and decency is being received by these folks.
Then decide if we want to help them or go to war with them.
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@Tim
I'm not buying it, at least not entirely, because the Trump voters in my (Long Island) neck of the woods were not out-of-work steel workers. Most of them were well educated, and middle class or above. Economic dispossession does not necessarily explain the Trumpism phenomenon. Cultural dispossession perhaps does, but conceding to that means conceding to racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant prejudice, and anti-Muslim bigotry. Should there be a place for that?
3
@Tim I think there is anger against globalisation but it’s not just the dispossessed. My middle class suburban parents with gold plated pensions celebrated from across the pond when Trump got into power. I think scratch beneath the surface and a lot (majority?) of people are bigots. Before the internet they were just random people occasionally ranting in a bar. Now the nob heads are getting organised.
3
@Tim
"All over the west, with Trump, Brexit, the yellow vest, the AfD etc. there is anger from people who have watched the elites create a world without a place for them."
This certainly isn't what happened in the United States, Tim, based on the pertinent studies. The people who voted for Trump were relatively well off. They were motivated the most by racial and gender resentment. Yes they are indeed angry. They do not want to give up their unearned and unmerited white entitlements and prerogatives.
4