Slavery was horrific, Vietnam was contributed to by our hubris as a nation, the Iraq war was based on a lie and Donald Trump is an abomination. All true. The author however was writing as an individual whose family and friends of the family suffered in a way that most of us can never comprehend. If we were in his shoes we would probably feel the same way. The rise of the radical right in Germany, in Poland, in Hungary and in the United States is a real concern. Prejudice and radicalism seem to be the order of the day. Trump is leading the parade and he has lots of followers. Too much emotion and self righteousness is being written in these comments, too much tit for tat, too many scoring points off other's opinions. Perhaps a more productive reaction would be trying to figure out how to stop the damage currently being done, beginning in our own countries. I'd rather focus on trying to stop the disaster occurring in this country while being aware of what's occurring in the rest of the world.
10
There are definitely shared sentiments between anti-EU, nationalist groups in Germany and elsewhere and Trump (and Brexit) supporters. But it's hard to draw deeper connections since Americans operate on a more superficial level, in general. Despite all our wars and interventions, we don't have the foggiest idea what war means for the people where it actually occurs. We haven't experienced warfare here since the civil war. Nearly EVERY German, Pole, Russian, Austrian, etc. lost close family members in WW2, or later in the gulags. We're great in sports and other games, but, compared to some of these folks who have experienced much more than us, we're like children.
11
One of the leaflets of the White Rose resistance movement that aimed to inspire Germans to rise against Hitler asked "Are we to be forever the nation which is hated and rejected by all mankind?"
Maybe not hated, but Germans seem to be rejected no matter what they do. It makes one wonder if they will ever be forgiven.
2
Today a swastika was painted on the wall of my favorite luncheonette in Randolph, NJ.
Bill’s is full of Wonderful people- a neighborhood institution and generous to all
It happened today
8
I was born in Germany in 1963, I am married to an American, became an American citizen in 2015, and have been living in this country now for over 10 years. I am aware of what is going on in Germany and, in particular, what has happened recently in Chemnitz. Those events and the rise of the AfD are shameful, especially in view of Germany's past. The AfD was voted into Germany's parliament due to the fact that Angela Merkel had the courage to help almost a million refugees by opening German borders while other countries closed them. Refugees are always convenient scapegoats (as American politics also illustrate), and the stressful situation helped to give the right-wingers a platform to incite fear and reactionary responses. Continuing unemployment in the East is an important background factor as well. But the author’s drastic headline as well as his conclusions are unfair to the majority of Germans. Germans fully support “the memorial culture"; it is embodied in the educational curricula of schools across Germany; it is exemplified in volumes of historical research, which the author seems to have overlooked. The "tripping steps" (Stolpersteine) in Berlin, to cite just one example of memorial culture calling attention to the crimes of the Nazi era, likewise seem to have escaped his attention. The majority of Germans did not vote for the AfD. No serious German claims that we are "done with our past".
24
1. To compare the current German right wing parties to the so-called Tausendjähriges Reich is laughable. For one, the dissent is about new immigrants unwisely forced on Germany in a short period, new immigrants that don't want to assimilate to German, or even European, culture. The dispute is not about race but about culture, and it would seem that a country is justified in defending its culture. The same thing has happened in different ways in other countries, notably Central Europe.
2. As far as history goes, and who is responsible, or, more appropriately, what is the meaning of something like the Holocaust, one could start by debating the meaning and reality of Faulkner's well-known phrase: The past is never dead. It's not even past.
3. When Santayana wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, he was too superficial. It's those who don't understand the past that may one day be forced to repeat it.
9
I just want to show appreciation to the Professor who wrote the article.
He has created quite an article that has been very eloquently written. I was kept intrigued by the technique used to write of how a victim could rise above and go beyond to publish something that shows a history with his family, could create such a responsive comment section
6
The question of atonement or recompense or models thereof aside, the only real repentance for a thing lies in never doing it again. Not to sin in that way against anyone. Which leads us to the question of what Germans, or any of us, are doing now.
5
That Professor Stanley, as an American adolescent (from Syracuse, New York), visited Berlin on a high school exchange program and wanted to know, “What about MY family’s history?”, speaks volumes. There are some real insights in this article, but the article’s terribly unfortunate approach threatens to obscure them. And its close paragraphs, about work, look awfully like an exercise in simple hatred that has no place in the NY Times.
5
Mr. Stanley what a liar you are to suggest that "America has not faced down its own horrendous past". In addition to ridding itself and much of the world of slavery, America has done more to lift people out of poverty and oppression than any other country in the history of the world.
4
For several subjective reasons, some jew people and the “gentiles” are still fighting for who is the best...often they share the first place in the racist category.
2
It does not make a person indecent to acknowledge the downsides of essentially wide-open immigration to Europe. There are legitimate and serious questions to ask about the social, economic, and yes, cultural, implications of bringing in so many immigrants so quickly.
But the European who dares to express these concerns is assured of being slandered as the worst kind of bigot, to be shut down and shut up, by liberals. And he’ll get a free lecture about the sins of European colonialism (or in Germany, Nazism), to boot. This has been happening for generations.
The left, in full control of the culture, certain that they are on the side of the angels and have “won history,” feel they no longer need to make room for honest debate, criticism or discussion from their right. So they have lost the ability to argue their own case, while the weapon of calling every challenge to their orthodoxy “bigotry” has become blunted by overuse.
What happens to legitimate dissent when the penalty for expressing it is abuse? It becomes warped by anger, and comes out in the form of AfD, Sweden Democrats, Five Star Movement, Fidesz and Trumpism.
41
@Livonian very well said. thank you.
3
My Austrian neighbor used to turn on her vacuum cleaner around 7am most mornings and go back to bed so the postman (and thereby her other neighbors) would not think that she was unfleissig/lazy. She ACTUALLY did this.
Americans think that there were goose-stepping Gestapo all over, during the Nazis, that kept everyone in line. Nope. Just a phone call from a ur-responsible neighbor was all they needed. Until you've had such neighbors, you won't really get it. Ask an immigrant Turk, Serb, Romanian, Albanian, they all know.... You just can't equate the flimsy, reactionary anti-immigration views in the US with the very deep-seated social beliefs and fears in Germanic countries. Compared to Germans, we have no principles.... for worse and for better. (And it's not all due to cultural history; our brains are pretty wired by the language we grow up with.)
9
In 2004, many Republican politicians from Bush 43 on down appealed to the very worst in American voters by pushing for an ultimately unsuccessful anti-gay Federal marriage amendment. During that period, they sponsored some 30 similar ballot initiatives at the state level, all of which passed. They reminded me of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany. If Americans ever experienced the same kind of economic problems that many Germans experienced from 1918-1932, many of them would be looking for scapegoats too.
3
So are you saying that the economic disaster which befell Germany during the depression justifies "scapegoating" people and acting on those beliefs?
Germany did horrible things to Jews and other people during the war. The modern STATE of Germany is something else. It is a democratic dream even if you, as anywhere else, can find undemocratic groups. Nevertheless, I do not find it fair to burden all young Germans for what happened 30-40 years before they were born.
On the other hand, looking at America’s own backyard, I see extremely worrying signs. An elected president whose agenda and rethorics resemble a lot that of Berlin 1933, a republican leadership that does not stand up to defend democratic values when attacked by their own president, small children taken from their immigrant mothers just like in Germany 75 years ago, the alt right movement that use the same rethorics towards non white people that Hitler used towards the Jews, global companies like Facebook and Twitter that immediately censor a picture of a woman’s breast in a post supporting research on breast cancer, while accounts menacing other people and spreading desinformation (lies) are allowed to remain untouched, all easily recognised from the German thirties.
It is important not to forget what happened in Germany before and during the war, but the main reason not to forget is not pity with the Jews, the main reason is to be aware of what can happen, recognise the signs when it is about to happen and stop it before it actually happens, anywhere, towards anybody.
So, do not forget history, but act in the present. Look around you, today…. and act..
17
As humans it’s very hard to apologize and correct our bad behavior. And the horrors inflicted on Jews, and non-Jewish citizens of invaded countries, resistance fighters, the mentally ill and handicapped, Catholic priests, Jehovahs Witnesses, and anyone who dared to care for Jewish citizens, cannot be easily atoned for. Hundreds of thousands were killed and their bodies left to rot even before others made it to the camps.
Although there were some heroic acts by citizens, there were many Germans who betrayed their Jewish neighbors and former friends for personal gain. Or they quietly looked the other way. A lot of homes, apartments, businesses that many current German families have inherited were originally stolen from Jewish families. Of course none of these people would never admit to this even when confronted with the truth.
The pain of admitting to the truth in Germany is not unlike racists here in the U.S., whose ancestors have benefitted from slave labor and genocide of Native Americans.
It’s easier to make yourself feel good by simple denying such things ever occurred or just saying, “Hey, that was the past and we weren’t a part of it. So why can’t people just get over it and move on.”
That’s the “feel good” approach that absolves feelings of guilt.
7
One understands more clearly that Germany's efforts to cleanse itself of its horrendous past and the idea that by its actions it 'moves past' something which cannot be moved past is a fiction.
But it is not entirely fair to burden only Germany with these crimes because the history of the world is redolent with them.
Nor is it accurate to assume that the final story has been written with regard to the Jews as the attacks against Judaism, Israel and Jews themselves continue unabated with the virulent BDS movement and Nazi marches taking place on college campuses and in American towns as we speak.
It is sad that we learn little from our past and seem unable to escape the essence of our human nature by force of intellect or moral strength.
In recalling a speech he witnessed by Phillip Jenninger, President of the Bundestag, Stanley chides Germans for daring speak of their own suffering. This is an important matter, given that in the post-war era such discussion was largely taboo in Germany, and unthinkable elsewhere, even though perhaps 2 million German civilians, who lived across Eastern Europe, were murdered towards the end of WWII. Among those killed were members of my own family. Stanley hopes that Germans will engage more directly with Jews, and seek to understand their pain, one that passes through generations. He might lead by example and note the words of Jose Lasso, the first High Commissioner of Human Rights at the UN who said "We bow our heads before the victims of Nazi aggression in the East. At the same time, we cannot remain insensitive to the suffering of innocent men, women and children from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland and other areas, who became victims of the unjust and immoral principle of collective punishment." Let me propose that many Germans suffered terribly in World War II, and that their pain also continues through the generations. Telling Germans, collectively, that "you were and remain racists" is hardly likely to promote the understanding that Stanley demands.
12
This is the first day of Rosh Hashana, when millions of Jews worldwide come together in prayer and meditation. As I sit or stand among my brethren, I cannot help but feel both pride and sadness in the fact that the Jews still survive, despite their centuries -long persecution. As is very painfully evident by a sizable proportion of these letters, our very tragic and unique history - yes, tragic and unique, culminating in the single greatest targeted slaughter ever - has been conflated with lesser horrors (horrors to be sure) and diminished by the passage of time since the Holocaust. What this means is eventually, if not already, it is really only the Jewish people who will preserve the memory of their deaths at the hands of the Nazis, as we have remembered our persecution over the course of thousands of years. In the end, we have only ourselves to fall back upon. As history has consistently demonstrated, no one, ultimately, will stand up for us, but ourselves. The purpose of the monuments to the Holocaust, to remind the world of the savagery inflicted upon the Jews and to perhaps prevent this from happening again, is already becoming a source of resentment. It appears evident that we are destined to remain the world's favorite scapegoat. We should not be blamed- and neither should Professor Stanley - for fighting for our continued survival.
4
Evil is very specific, and comes in degrees.
The singular, monumental evil of Germany in the first half of the 20th century was not its anti-Semitism – other countries were guilty of it. It was its carrying out of that disease to its ultimate perversely logical conclusion: the elimination of six million humans. This was done, mostly, in an impersonal way on a massive industrial scale, similar to the slaughter of cattle for food. The methodology was designed for maximum efficacy (the most in the shortest possible time) that also shielded the guilty from responsibility, excessive moral misgivings and the debilitating feelings of guilt. With obvious exceptions, such as in shootings, in a gas chamber no one person actually killed another. The enormity grew under the grotesque nature of the enterprise, and further when we take into account the overarching objective: the permanent elimination of an entire group of humans who committed no crime but who could logically do nothing to escape their fate.
Debates about whether Germany has faced its past never seem to start with the magnitude of its misdeeds. But surely they must. The necessary treatment of “Vietnam” is not the same as the necessary treatment of the unsuccessful “Final Solution”.
The question is not whether Germany has “come to terms with its past"; such leeway would be a luxury. The question is whether Germany has atoned for its guilt, or put differently, whether Germany has yet paid a sufficient price.
21
@John Xavier III
What price would you consider to be sufficient?
2
@John Xavier III
...and the US? Have you paid ANYTHING to Vietnam? Or nothing is sufficient?
6
@John Xavier III, you might spare a thought for the millions of Native Americans destroyed in the taking of the land in which you dwell, or millions of slaves' lives spent in oppression here. You may be sure that it was those black people's utility as beasts of burden, no more humane concern, that justified their lives in most of white America then. You absolve yourself too easily in the pose of a purer sort. Born in Germany in 1900, you might not have been as pure as you think now. It is a trouble in humanity, make no mistake, and no nation is immune--it's dangerous to think yours is.
8
Here is the way for the professor to more objectively enter into the conversation of who has done the best job to reconcile a dark past?
Germany would be ranked either #1 or #2, the US and the UK would be ranked close to the very bottom somewhere close to China.
The metrics aren't a couple of visits to a country and some nationalist movement demonstrations. Rather measure how much effort has been made towards reconciliation and steps taken to prevent such a rise in the future.
The article is to basically say the US isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. But the fact is the US is one of the worst at reconciliation and at putting measures up to stop repeating history again and again.
The fact that the US government is on occupied soil and has a long history of injustice to native American Indians who have never been compensated, nor a proper reconciliation for slavery, the Confederate flag until recently on State Capitol building and a few public statues being moved to private lands, is hardly progress nor the internment of American-born Japanese from WWII (as the lessons fell on deaf ears with the recent internment and separation of asylum seekers and immigrants alike). The fact that the US has invaded 37 nations since WWII and killed over 20 million people with not even as much of a look at its actions by its people, not even an apology by former leaders that they pushed the US into a war in Iraq under false pretences!
Whose past is present again?
14
I have one foot in Germany and one in the USA, having spent decades in both countries. I see no fundamental difference between the AfD and Chemnitz and the Republican Party/Trumpists and Charlottesville. Both are racist movments representing a large minority of the populace.
13
Eventually, by 2025 or so, everyone who caused all that will be dead. At length, everyone has to let go of everything. The dead are dead. They are not coming back. In time enough there will not even be a Germany or a Jewish people, or even the human race as we now know it.
25,000 years hence Polaris will again be the pole star. By then, nobody will be dwelling on this subject any longer.
Let them sleep.
2
Civilization is like gardening, a never-ending battle with aspects of human nature that thrive if unattended, like weeds. The notion that racism, xenophobia or any other reflection of our dark side can be cleared out of society as if there were a vaccine against them is damned to fail. Particularly at the time of the first age of the internet, which lifts all barriers in airing terrible opinions, which then comfort those who share them, and encourage them to come together, and so on.
The problem is when those ever-present dangerous views reach power. I think it's more likely that a celebration of brutality and carnage will start in America, with 300 million guns in private hands, and half the electorate going for a man who endorses guns, violence against opponents and describes neo-Nazis as fine people, than in Germany.
5
It is no doubt true, as Mr. Stanley says, that Germany has never faced its past with complete honesty. But the endless drumbeat of talk about racism, the Holocaust, etc. is not necessarily making them more likely to. This is particularly true when it is used as a cudgel by elites, in Europe and America, in order to maintain their own power. Perhaps less talk and more listening would be helpful to everyone?
4
@Mike Livingston
Why not try some more enlightening approach yourself and accept that there is actually no sentient being in the world that could reasonably be called "Germany".
From this point on the next step would be to admit that what is defining "german dealing with its historical past" can hardly be judged in the manner you are doing here: "Germany" is in that way or another honest or dishonest in dealing with its past.
What you really will see is a multitude of different coping mechanisms with some number of people taking self-serving, self-victimizing ways, escapism and whataboutery, others more honestly accepting political responsibility for their nation, some others more extremely accepting some kind of personal shame or guilt they feel submitted to, just depending on the era of german post-war history as well as a variety of social variables, regional, political, psychological etc. Statistics will give a better hint of this than subjective experiences and the anecdotes many seem to espouse here, especially if they try to establish generalizing conclusions that never sound very objective or reality-bound to me.
But all of this is sadly also quite lacking in Stanley's article.
4
Mr. Stanley leaves out the impact the sudden influx of 1,5 million refugees have had on the political landscape in Germany. Other European countries - which took in almost no refugees - have moved further to the right than Germany.
These refugees are not easy to integrate. And it would be easy to simply blame racism or xenophobia for that. They grew up in countries where women are basically property of their husbands/fathers, Israel and Jews are considered their arch enemies and Western values are often despised. Obviously there are tensions. And there are quite a few German Jews who are equally worried about right-wing extremism as they are about violence coming from Muslim extremists.
Secondly, the Holocaust is an essential part of German identity. But there are other dark parts of Germany`s history which are often swept under the carpet: e.g. the attempted genocide of the Slavic peoples in the East which also cost millions of lives but is rather a sidenote in German history books.
8
I read quite a few of these thoughtful comments. I am struggling to find new insights and moral guidance in this, my seventieth year, which coincides with the Trump nightmare. I am also brought up against my feelings toward Israel; as a Jew I thought I had issues pretty well settled since my childhood. In the wake of Trump and Netanyahu, I am having to reassess whose bed I find myself sleeping in, so to speak.
I feel for Germans not born during the Nazi era. Feeling morally stained and tainted from birth with history's worst horrors must be a painful and puzzling experience. I do believe we lay that original sin on Germans.
I'd never want to see people lambasted for what their ancestors did (unless they proudly embrace the crimes as do pro-confederate Americans).
But dead is dead. Mr. Stanley sort of dismisses offhand the criticisms that the U.S. hasn't really dealt with our disingenuously lie-driven wars in Vietnam and the middle east. I'm sure the families of innocents who died at our hands wish for America to belly up to a full reckoning too.
Lastly, the worst people in the world have now crawled out from under their respective logs, emboldened by Trump. If I saw in Germany comparable support in the millions for a lunatic like we show for Trump, I would be appalled and very worried indeed.
68
@Trista
Thanks, finally someone who understands
3
Unfortunately, the author fails to point out that until the 1990 unification, the Soviet East German (DDR) and the West German (BRD) governments had very different interpretations and approaches to how they dealt with the holocaust and the Hitler era in general. This is important in analyzing the present, as a large part of the current generation of German adults spent most or all of their childhood, attended school and developed much of their historical perspective during that period. It is interesting that the AfD demonstration was in Chemnitz, formerly Karl Marx Stadt, which was previously in the DDR.
26
@dogrunner1 Thank you for writing this. The DDR never even attempted to come to a reckoning with its Nazi past. Instead the DDR was declared "good" and "pure" and the only Nazis were to be found in West Germany.
6
In 1970 I went to Germany to live. My mother is of German origin and my maternal grandmother raised me speaking German. In order to improve my language skills, I enrolled in a German for Foreigners (Deutsch für Ausländer) class. I was put in the advanced group. Our teacher had us read William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" in the German translation. I was impressed by how critical my teacher was in talking openly about Germany's recent past. I lived in Germany for 26 years.
I have now read Dr. Stanley's article twice - once this morning and now again. What more does he want for 80 million people to do to satisfy him and his call for retribution? I did not have the impression that Germans in general think to be better than other nations. That is a characteristic reserved for the USA, England, and Australia. I think that the author should read some of WEB DuBois' writings and maybe the books by James Baldwin. Add to that a short study of what happened at Haymarket Square in Chicago and some of the writings of the Know-Nothing Party in our own country - maybe visit some "Indian Reservations" and look at what our present government is doing to Spanish speakers, how our police deal with Black Men, read some of the diatribes against gays, lesbians and transgender people. I was fired from my job at an American university by a born-again Christian for being gay. That has ruined my life. I never experienced anything like that in Germany. Gott sei dank!
59
@Robb Kvasnak OK, but Australia?
@Robb Kvasnak
"I did not have the impression that Germans in general think to be better than other nations." Did you ever ask people from other nations that know them well, like French, Italians, Turks.... how about Austrians? Maybe if you spent some time with them in other countries am Urlaub (on holidays)....
3
You make some good points. The US has not gotten nearly as far as Germany has, despite Germany having fallen short in the eyes of the author. That said, I truly hope being fired has not literally ruined your life. There are places in this country where you would be welcome to work, where people are more evolved.
3
The author despite all his self-allusions to intelligence, scholarship and claimed mastery of history either is blinded by his obvious life-long indoctrination to believe that he is owed something for the simple fact that he is Jewish, a superior race or culture, and most importantly ignorant of the fact that at least in western European conceptions of justice and reason (as opposed to medievalist race-based Middle Eastern notions) only individuals actually guilty of committing crimes can logically and legitimately be punished for crimes. Humiliating and unjustly punishing by now not only children, but grand children and great grandchild Germans for something one of their ancestors MIGHT have done (most Germans were not in the army or the Gestapo ...) is precisely the kind of blind racial and ethnic hatred that Zionists claim to oppose. Now, these decades of injustice and assaults on innocents for historical events have predictably caused people to fight back and are the fault of those like Stanley who have shamelessly gained all manner of undeserved bullying power and deference privilege from this tragic history for decades.
6
@winthrop staples Suggest you read "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," by Donald Goldhagen. I think you'll find enough blame to go round.
5
@Antoine
But you do know that Goldhagen's views have hardly ever been well-received by mainstream scholars, not just of the self-serving german type of academic, do you?
1
Very glad that you pointed this out.
2
I've had German coworkers and have traveled to Germany. The vast majority of Germans regard their recent past with horror and shame.
A German born in 1945, the year Berlin was burnt to the ground, would today be 73 years old. Any individual who followed Naziism would be in their 90s, or would be long dead.
I am not personally responsible, as an American, for atrocities against Native Americans or African Americans, though I rightly view them, through the lens of history, with abhorrence.
Similarly, individual Germans today should despise all things totalitarian, but should not be blamed, shamed, nor penalized for events that occurred long before they were born.
Today is a day of both atonement and forgiveness. Other than the US, there are few staunch allies of Israel besides Germany, and there are few countries that have helped Europe and the Middle East as substantively as Germany.
We may forgive what horrific things they did, and move forward together, today, or we can encourage still more mutual division, distrust, and conflict by holding the sins of their fathers over their head.
Which plays directly into the hands of those few who would still divide us.
10
@drunicusrex--no one is talking about holding you or anyone else personally accountable for your father's mistakes. The point of the article, which you and others seem to ignore, is that Nazi ideas are still very much alive in Germany. If it wasn't true, then why is there an AfD? Your attempt to shift the theme is a coward's way out.
Sad to say, as interesting as this article is, there is no mention of the ongoing demonizing of the Palestinian people in Israel. Germany has never been any different than any other society, plenty of both good and bad. Israel is no different than any other society, plenty of both good and bad and yet not a word here about what the Jewish people who fled Europe and its heinous policies towards them is now doing to the people whose land they appropriated. History just repeats and repeats and repeats.
12
@lzolatrov
You mean those Arab neighbors who have it actually written in their constitution the complete destruction of Israel and the annihilation of its people?
I think you may be confusing who is advocating for a holocaust in the modern day Middle East.
1
Germany's Nazi past is still present?
How can it not be? By this I mean take typical left wingers politically around the world, those most likely to speak out against racism, religion, nationalism, to be for socialism: What advance really have they made against racial, ethnic, religious, etc. identification within their own ranks not to mention right wing trends around the world?
By this I mean daily we hear from left wingers about the rise of say white nationalism, but they themselves never tire of talking about minority groups, increasing pride, numbers, standing of this or that marginalized racial or ethnic group. All that's apparently being accomplished by left wingers is playing down as much as possible the racial, ethnic, religious, etc. identification of majorities and playing up the same identifications among minorities, "correcting the balance of power", creating a "multicultural society".
There seems little difference really between right and left wingers around the world. Neither really overcomes racial, ethnic, religious, national, cultural identity. True, socialism is supposed to make a dent in these identities, but does anyone really know of anyone capable of creating a personal identity apart from race or ethnicity or religious or cultural background? How successful are humans at transcending these forms of identification?
If it's so important to overcome these identifications should we not be hearing daily from psychologists pinpointing such persons?
1
"Germany’s Nazi Past Is Still Present."
That is, of course, an exaggeration focusing on a small minority who represent remnant of a mind set that once was predominant in East Germany. Those who know today's Germany, understand Germany's social and political evolution in the last half-century, its current cultural dynamics and its progressive view of the rest of the world, never go that far.
But what is truly frightening is that "Germany's Nazi past" is currently being revived in the US. And, as pointed out by Frau Merkel, that makes it crucial for European countries not to rely on the US for managing their collective security. And, in particular, to thwart attempts at introducing fractures in the fabrics of EU.
7
Germany, in recent decades, has been very good at documenting the Nazi period and Hitler. Yet there is, even today, far less discussion on the extent to which antisemitism, especially after 1918, was a growing force among Germans, even those who were not Nazis, or whether Hitler, in his rise to power, was pushing against an increasingly open door of public opinion on that issue. A reading of news reports, diaries and letters from that era seem to suggest that was the case.
The same Philipp Jenninger quoted in the author's piece, made a very controversial speech commemorating Kristallnacht in 1988. Attempting to capture the attitude of most Germans during the 1930's, Jennniger rhetorically asked: "And as for the Jews, hadn't they in the past, after all, sought a position that was not their place? Mustn't they now accept a bit of curbing? Hadn't they, in fact, earned being put in their place?'' Jenninger's remarks were not well received by many in Germany.
5
Back in the seventies/eighties, as a teenager and young man I had a number of German and Austrian friends.
Three thoughts about them and this essay:
1) It is, or at least it was, considered an obvious truth that "the sins of the father are not the responsibility of the son". Just as my grandfather's racist attitudes didn't mean my father was a racist.
2) The Germans, by nature, are a hardheaded and, in some ways, difficult people. But they're also warm, friendly, funny. And thoroughly human.
3) The Nazis were responsible for the murders of twelve million people (not counting POWs). Six million were Jewish. The other six million deserve to be remembered, too.
12
It should be no more of a surprise that a neo-nazi march happened in Chemnitz, than a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Like Americans, Germans differ in their attitudes and values regionally. That the march occurred under the watchful gaze of an over-sized communist-era bust of Marx also tells you something about a community still simmering in yesterday's propaganda.
The GDR (East Germany) never "reckoned" with its nazi past. Instead, communist authorities declared themselves fascist "victims," blew-up much of their surviving pre-war cultural monuments, and rebuilt the ruined country with hideous modern piles - just like Chemnitz. The poisons are bubbling up three generations after Walter Ulbricht buried them.
Mr. Stanley makes a number of observations worth noting. The mass shootings likely took more lives than the camps. They were also devastatingly effective. Fifteen hundred years of Jewish life and culture were wiped out in the space of a few years. For the once thriving communities of Prague, Lvov, Amsterdam and a host of others, there is no one left today, not even descendants, to remember them. But at least West Germany had a reckoning. Neither Romania nor Hungary was ever held accountable for their enthusiastic collusion in genocide. And today the Hungarians are reinventing anti-Semitic hate for the 21st Century.
16
"All of this is hard for Americans to understand."
You're kidding, right?
5
We are all the children of our parents, and they are the children of theirs. We have learned from them how to live, how to think. And so it goes on. A society does not change quickly, its character moves slowly down from generation to generation.
As an American who has lived for many decades in Germany I know what Mr. Stanley writes about. Germans are not the only people who prefer the stance of victimhood to that of responsibility. It remains unfortunate, however, that most Germans still face their nation's unique history in a spirit of what-about-ism. Any mention of the holocaust will immediately be answered by reminders of my own country’s sins, from the crimes against the native population right up to and including the election of President Trump. McCarthy, I have even been told, was essentially no better than Hitler. And so on.
Germany practices Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past) with many formalities. But there is still much resistance to it in the hearts of its people.
10
The "reckoning" with the German past was a longer process in the West (The Federal Republic) than in the East (The Democratic Republic), where the Communists preferred to believe that the Nazi past was not their problem. So it is no surprise to find that recent right-wing violence arose in the former Communist east, in Chemnitz.
Lately there have been attempts to shift some responsibility for the Holocaust from Germany to Poland, noting that the concentration camps were located on Polish soil, and the camp guards were often "Eastern Europeans." It bears repeating that the Germans established and operated the camps when they occupied and controlled Polish territory, and that none of the guards were ethnic Poles.
7
This gathering storm in Europe and America, has little to do with past actions of the people, and everything to do with the failures so evident in the politics of the present. The planet does not belong to the few who in post WW2 thought they could shape the world for their own exploitation.They have simply run out of time and the cover of darkness to continue in this erroneous way. Their time is up, as the changes we are seeing today, are just at the beginning of a process that still has a long way to go before it will reach its completion.
6
The author's interesting (but maybe recklless) IMPLICIT comparison between the "Arbeiter" roots of the Nazis and the working class core of Trump's supporters misses an important distinction. Many Trump folks in the rural area where I live may quietly judge those from the city/suburbs for 'not knowing a hard day's work' - as did/do Germanic people often. But they are far less rational, in mentality, here. They do not bring in the whole, gene pool/genetic load perspective (and if they did their own pedigrees would undermine it). This is a huge difference and the false equivalency is very common in this paper - and it's also reckless. For example, the conservative folks here have more respect for hard-working Mexicans than did my conservative Austrian neighbors have for hard-working Bulgarians. The use of highly-selected images of Trump supporters at large, suburban and urban rallies to demonstrate xenophobia, bigotry, etc. is not empirical and does not represent the more typical (i.e. median), non-affluent Trump supporters that I see (non-empirically, of course) - and, if so, it too is reckless.
4
For more perspective, read "The Death of Democracy " and "Bloodlands." The riots mentioned early in the article are eerily reminiscent of events that helped Hitler rise to power in the late 1920s and early 30s. The article falls very short of enumerating the horror inflicted on Jews and non Germans by the SS and equally so by the Soviets when they took over Ukraine and Poland. Millions died by gunshots and even more by deliberate starvation. History is showing early signs of repeating itself as there is a loss of generational memory of the horrors of authoritarianism, prejudice, and war.
3
When I was a in 2nd or 3d Grade in the 1950s, there was a very blond haired German girl in my class some of the meaner and/or stupider boys, of which I was surely one of the latter, used to tease by calling her "hotsy totsy little Nazi!" (The "hotsy hotsy Nazi" line seems to have originated in Walter Gourlay's 1940 protest song against the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and was later incorporated in Mel Brooks' "The Producers".) Later, after I learned about WWI, WWII and the Holocaust and saw films of the liberated concentration camps, I formed the belief that Germans were inferior human beings incapable basic decency.
Fortunately, aided and abetted by formal education, travel and human contact, I learned not to treat Germans as if they are the offspring of the murderous psychopaths who carried out industrialized genocide and killings of those the Germans considered inferior (Jews, Gypsies, disabled, communists and liberals). I believed that unlike Americans who continued racist policies toward blacks long after slavery's proponents had been defeated in a civil war, Germans had overcome their own bigoted history. However, the Right's reemergence in Germany, especially in the former communist east, has rendered that belief false indeed. So as pathetic as it seems, Germany and America are joined at the hip in terms of their failures to defeat racism and bigotry and apparent need to promote and protect the privilege of a white skin.
7
The most pernicious evasion of the guilt and shame for the sins of the Third Reich is in the use of the term "Nazi" instead of "German".
"The Nazis committed the Holocaust"; "the Nazi's waged aggressive war against their neighbors"; "the Nazis used slave labor";" the Nazis slaughtered civilians"; "The Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of mentally and physically disabled citizens".
And it's not only Germans who perform this shifting of responsibility from themselves to a seemingly alien force; historians, journalists, and commentators of all kinds do it too.
Prior to 1933 the NSDAP was one political party among many; after 1933 it was the only party, and the distinction between nation and party was gradually obliterated until by 1939 it didn't really exist. The Nazis and the Germans had become one and the same.
The Nazi entity is extinct, so it's easy to shift culpability to it - like blaming all one's failures on a dead parent or sibling. Germans seem to have embraced this escape route, and perhaps out of misplaced kindness, many outside of Germany who should know better have aided them.
Let's stop this. Let's refer only to the Germans and save the term Nazi only for members of the NSDAP performing specific party functions.
8
The real problem all across the world is authoritarian psychology, this is as in play in contemporary Germany as everywhere else — might makes right is a form of faux religion and it is promoted by constant and unquestioning media attention, or worse lazy journalism the world over which fails to explore the source of legitimate fears of cultural change which lead to the irrational embrace of hate.
Let he who is without sin... Germany's Nazi Past is still present in America. About a year ago a Nazi March in Virginia lead to the death of Heather Heyer an innocent young woman protesting against hate, and the injury of many others. Trump's rallies look more and more like that Nazi march with a young man in Montana being retained and questioned by the Secret Service for raising his eyebrows skeptically on camera. Children stolen from their parents because they have brown skin are still in the custody of the Government which deported their parents and threw them in cages.
In Germany like everywhere else, people have to decide to do the right thing for themselves, there's no progressive shortcut to make the Easterners turn to westerners — they have to evolve. Yet the rule of law must be maintained, that has been compromised in Chemnitz.
5
After an influx of a million refugees, the resurgence of Germany's far-right was a foregone conclusion. How Merkel couldn't grasp that basic understanding rather proves how absolutely out-of-touch politicians in general are from ordinary people trying to eke out a living in the neighborhoods.
If any country in Europe had seen the same influx of refugees, exactly the same would have happened. (It's also happening in Sweden!) This is not unique to Germany, although people do enjoy making those simplistic comparisons to Germany in the 1930s. And if you want to make those comparisons, they can be made a lot closer to home. Remember, Secret Service agents recently hassled a school-kid at a Trump rally, for not being enthusiastic. Trump couldn't bring himself to condemn Nazis! Like Obama said: "How hard is that?!"
7
They are demonstrating and voting for the Alternative for Germany because Angela Merkel shoved 1 million+ refugees down their throats. What did everybody thing would happen?
5
The war refugees were already in neighboring countries. They needed to stay somewhere. Other nations should have helped. They did not. You better blame their lack of empathy and action than Angela Merkel who made the right decision. Why would the refugees cause resentment? Why would this resentment be justified in any way? What have refugees done to the German people? The German economy is booming. Unemployment is low. The German state flush in money. It enjoys a budgetary surplus. Where is objective proof of any harm to the German nation’s wellbeing?
And the picture of refugees “rammed down the throat” is disturbing and utterly wrong.
2
Whether it’s the Holocaust in Germany or the Civil War in America, William Faulkner’s sentiment comes to mind: “The past is never dead. It is even the past.”
2
Chemnitz is deep in the former East Germany. This region is significantly poorer that the rest of Germany. Between 1945 and reunification, a period of almost 25 years, its residents were not taught about Germany's responsibility in the Holocaust. These facts do not justify the riots there, but should be kept in mind before drawing conclusions about Germany as a whole.
4
The legitimization of white supremacy so palpable in America following the election of President Donald Trump means that the "case is never settled." The case remains alive, requiring all persons of decent disposition to struggle against it.
here on our soil it is now clear that our confrontation against racism demands that we never assume the permanent defeat of its most pernicious aspects.
While progressives struggled to make the United States more civil and racially equitable, the forces of prejudice and hatred were always bubbling beneath the surface. Those forces never went away.
Now, once again, abetted by the darker elements of our current Administration and the Republican Party that runs it, the always extant undercurrent of ugliness is out in the open. It demands our constant attention and active engagement.
Left to its own devices, the carcinogen of hatred festers and grows unchecked. The signals for resistance are calling us out loudly; our failure to heed them makes us no better than Germany of 1933.
4
The writer omits an important element in his story.
The Allies had clear intentions and a process to match to denazify German society and to make each and every German face up to what the Third Reich had wrought. However, 2 facts intervened.
First of all, no-one on the Allied side had anticipated quite how many Germans had been involved, tainted if you prefer. Indeed, everyone who was employed in any capacity by the state at any level should have been made to account for his or her actions and attitudes. In other words, millions of people. It was quickly realized that this was an impossible task, so, too, because of the burden it put on the Allies themselves. Who could actually carry out such an assessment?
Secondly, it became very clear very quickly that the Soviet Union would not put its Armed Forces on a peace footing. Whereas the Western Allies wanted to bring the boys home as soon as possible, Stalin was happy to maintain hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops in Europe and was busy transforming the conquered / liberated states there into obedient puppets.
Making sure that West Germany recovered and became a reliable partner in the economic development of of Europe and, later, a key member of NATO was way more important than denazification.
So yes, it's all still there. Just scratch the surface.
1
De-anything has never been a workable "solution" (word choice!!!)
De-Baathification in Iraq has led us directly to ISIS and a 7 figure death toll and turmoil across the middle east and north africa right into Europe. All on the US. Win some, lose some? Go figure.
1
What would a "full reckoning" even look like?
What would the German right even look like were it not for Merkel's decision to throw open the border to immigrants coming from a world radically unlike Germany's?
Is the recent upsurge in German right politics due to the appeal of Nazism and resentment of WW2, or to more modern issues? What's more reasonable to think?
What would the political landscape in Germany look like if, instead of being brushed off by a knee-jerk conflation of "right" or conservative politics with Nazism, dominant parties engaged the AfD early on on sensitive topics?
Germany's past has been a ball-and-chain on only one dimension of its politics and now we see the resentment of that coming through after the Left's monopoly of power has unbalanced society.
They never bothered to compromise because they felt that the stigma of WW2 would never allow the right to grow. They were obviously wrong.
3
AfD does not exist by neglect. It exists because PERCEIVED alienation is a very effective political recruitment tool used by unscrupulous populists and yes, fascists. Nice try at legitimizing the AfD though.
#deplorables
5
My Father, a German Jew, grew up in Leipzig in the 20's and early 30's. Half the family escaped, half didn't. If he were still alive, I know what he would say: Human attitudes and behaviors may slowly change over hundreds or thousands of years - decades are nothing. I've spent my lifetime wondering when human ugliness and ferocity would return to the main stage - and here we are.
7
All humans have this same capacity for terrible evil - it's in our genes, it's how we evolved - it's our original sin. As any deeply shared sin it must be resisted, it must be guarded against, it takes conscious effort, it does not end with the perpetrators. So when Germans speak that the past is past - enough guilt - or when Chief Justice Roberts says we don't need to enforce voting rights because discrimination and racial suppression are no longer part of the American experience - they are telling lies that not only obscure reality but give license to new atrocities. Now we have a President who speaks to our worst instincts. He has built his own political ascendency by unleashing and empowering the terrible evil within. God help us all.
4
I understand your concerns. Yet I wonder whom you spoke to at Foggy Bottom when the president made Richard Grenell the ambassador to Germany. I understand that you are concerned about the fate of minorities in Germany again. Yet I don't recall any writings from you stating that our country should be a guiding light to the liberal democracies. I don't recall any writings discussing the speech that our president gave in Poland. At the end of the day, it is important that we all stand up against this behavior. No matter who is perpetrating this behavior. At this moment our country along with Russia are the largest supporters of this illiberal behavior and I strongly suggest that you would do well to broaden your scope of activity.
7
I think Germany is way ahead of America in outgrowing its past. They have superb social plans for medical and educational programs, worker training programs, etc. etc., and a strong export/import ratio. America is nowhere near that level, and with the white supremacist crowd created Trump phenomena, we are racing full speed backwards, as they are actually in power.
It's not even close in my book.
6
As an American of German-Jewish descent, I must defend my grandfather's country.
I would point to Germany's reaction to Angela Merkel's encounter with a Palestinian refugee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4bvFohf8Jk
Although Merkel told the girl (correctly) that the rules would require her to leave, the public outpouring of support led to a decision to let her stay.
Immigration was one of Merkel's big political problems. She made a political sacrifice to accommodate a large number of refugees.
Germany chose compassion over expediency.
This is the Germany I can be proud of.
5
What would have happened if, in 1890 at the end of Bismarck's long time in office as Chancellor, a British author had written a work of fiction that accurately described in detail what Germany actually did to the Jews during Hitler's time?
Nobody would have, because before the Navy Laws of Germany, Britain saw France and Russia as its rivals and Germany as a friend to help contain them.
However, if someone did anyway, the British simply would not have believed it, and nobody would have bought it. Meanwhile, if noticed in Germany, there would have been outrage over the extreme insult. They would have pointed out Germany's long proud history, including treating its own population far better than did Britain.
Yet that interlude did happen.
So now what? Does everything else disappear? Did it all never happen? Did only the Holocaust happen, nothing else?
Of course the Holocaust mustn't be forgotten and cannot be disregarded. But what about everything else? Must it all be forgotten and disregarded? Does Hitler have that power over a reality and history of over 2,000 years?
As Zhou Enlai (Chou En Lai in our papers of the Vietnam Era) said in 1972 of the French Revolution of 1789, it is too soon to tell how to balance all this out. We are too close.
However, the real lesson is not about Germany at all. If even Germany could do that, then ANY modern society could do it too. None are so more advanced than Bismarck's Germany that they are entirely safe from decent into barbarity.
8
@Mark Thomason Until 1917, the members of the Concordia-Argonaut Jewish men's club in San Francisco hung a picture of the German Kaiser on their dining room wall. It was s symbol of how proud they were of their ancestral homeland. Indeed, the period 1871-1914 was something of a Golden Age for Germany's Jews although when I was growing up decades later in a Jewish immigrant community Germany and Nazis were synonymous.
5
About 15 years ago I was working in an international organization in the Balkans. I had a short conversation with a German doctoral student in political science who had spent most of her childhood in east Germany before the reunification of Germany in 1989.
She questioned whether Germany needed to reckon with what it did in the Second World War. I took her attitude to be particular to people who came of age in the German Democratic Republic (east Germany).
The east Germans suffered under the Soviet occupation and were punished (there is probably a more appropriate word) by the Soviets for the Second World War. Still, however they approached their German past, in their particular political context the reckoning with history must have been very different from what took place in west Germany (what is described in this article).
5
Dear Mr. Stanley,
I felt very depressed reading your article and perceiving your pain. How are Germans ever to get over their own guilt - even though the people personally responsible for the holocaust are basically all dead - when the descendants of the victims cannot forgive and move on? Do you believe in hereditary collective guilt? I'm not exactly sure what you expect the Germans to do. The rise of the political right is a Europe-wide phenomenon and directly related to the huge influx of refugees from other cultures. Not to mention the rise of Trump and the right in our own country. You seem to ignore that. Attributing the criticism of Greece to German feelings of superiority is not fair considering the facts that came out about corruption and chaos in that country.
You condemn Germany's own discussion of its guilt narrative, the Historikerstreit, which by the way was also largely condemned by most German scholars and politicians. But how can any nation ever regard itself as decent and honorable without at some point moving beyond the horrors in its past. The US has successfully done so, i.e. moved on very quickly from its own history of slavery and genocide to become a proud and patriotic nation with some recent attempts at a reckoning, although the descendants of those victims are still discriminated against today. You mention this but dismiss it as "whataboutism". I not so sure it's not a double standard.
20
Very interesting. The author may not have seen as many memorials as he would've liked back in the 80's (and probably would've been ideal), but he does not seem to appreciate that his small group of America students (many likely Jewish), by being addressed by the Bundestag president, were afforded a privilege that few German students (or Italian, Swedish, Australian, etc.) would have enjoyed - and this, in part, reflects Germany's effort to take responsibity for the Holocaust. (The DAAD program may also reflect this.) I know this because the director or our newly established study abroad program (of Cornell) in '83 was a KZ survivor (and lost his immediate family) and hadn't been back since then - it was very moving. He/we were granted access and courticies that a director from Sheboygan could never arrange. (I went on to enroll as a German student and abandon insane Cornell tuition and, of course, credit transfer.) Later, I saw Jewish graduate students and post-docs from various countries also provided academic and social liberties that could be regarded as an informal, restitution effort (however minor, considering....) Such overtures should be reinforced, not ignored.
6
As a German, my heart goes out to the author and his family. The atrocities of WW2 should never be denied nor forgotten, to make sure that they will NEVER happen again. IMHO, everybody should have to visit a concentration camp and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.
But I have two questions directed at Dr. Stanley. First, what is a German? The latest population demographics show that out of 81.74 million Germans, 9.84 million have a "direct" migration background. In other words, over 12% of Germans are either first-generation Germans or are immigrants themselves. Many of these migratory Germans came to Germany after WW2. How do you tie them to Germany's Nazi past? Looking at the photo of Germans in Chemnitz shows exactly what I am talking about. The picture shows what we call a multi-culti society.
Second, statistics also show that the extreme right is very strong mostly in the "neue Laender," which are those who made up Eastern Germany. Researchers have found three reasons why that is so, and none of these have to do with the Nazi past. They are related to having grown up in a society closed to the outside (remember the Wall?), feeling socially and economically disadvantaged to former West Germans, and feeling economically disadvantaged to new immigrants.
20
Human don’t think well in several dimensions, as Mr. Stanley’s piece shows. His family and other German Jews suffered greatly. So did most Germans in the aftermath of World War II. Both their suffering exist simultaneously.
A cruel lesson of history is that the wrong people always end up paying the tab; the defeat of Germany by the allies initiated, in the portion occupied by the Soviet army, the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.” By some accounts, every German girl and woman from eight to sixty within Soviet territory was raped, some as many as 60 to 70 times. The younger women and girls were raped most frequently, though they bore the least responsibility for the German war effort and atrocities. The greatest suffering was visited upon the youngest, whose young lives started with suffering their nation’s military defeat, with much greater misery to come.
Remembering history does not mean erasing your suffering and fetishizing your atrocities. German civilization’s contribution to world culture is immense, notwithstanding the atrocities of WWII. Germans born today have almost a century between them and the Holocaust. Germans have done better than most in remembering their mistakes. The Turks deny even the existence of the Armenian genocide; imagine the Israeli reaction to a proposal that the Nakba be memorialized and taught in every school! Moreover, endless genuflection to historic guilt inevitably backfires; you get neo-Nazis there, Trump here.
10
@NLG -- "imagine the Israeli reaction to a proposal that the Nakba be memorialized and taught in every school!"
That day will come. Meantime, they are doing as did the Segregation Forever folks of the American South resisting civil rights laws. That is powerful in the moment, but it is not forever.
1
@NLG Not sure what the argument is here. It's not about individual Germans, it's about the culture, and I'd have to see a profound transformation of that culture before I would relieve German of guilt. As far as I can tell, leopard don't change its spots. It's also ridiculous to compare Germany's post-war "suffering" with what happened to one-third of the world's Jewish population.
2
@Antoine
The comparison wouldn't seem at all ridiculous to you if you were in fact a young German girl who was raped dozens of times by enraged Red Army soldiers and died as a result. Your comment is what I mean by 'humans don’t think well in several dimensions.'
Given a choice between, say, being a German Jew executed by a bullet to the head and the fate of the girl described above, I would unhesitatingly pick the former. I bet most would, probably you as well. It's (obviously!) a far closer call with respect to long-term concentration camp victims; both fates are so gruesome there's not much to choose.
Your comment resonates with the one attributed to Stalin: 'he should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle."'
It's hard to hold simultaneous conflicting cases of great suffering in one's head at the same time. One wants to select the worst of the two, and use it to erase the conflict, and thus erase the other suffering.
It's hard, but not that hard, if one tries. Obviously, we understand the reference to a 'trifle' is repulsive and disturbing, but that's the trap that awaits us if we think too much with our instinct and not enough with our head and our true heart.
This op-ed is a joke: (1) the violence in Chemnitz came because a German man was stabbed to death by failed asylum seekers [Germany took in c. 2 million asylum seekers, many of them adult males and most of whom are unemployed and unemployable, notwithstanding whether they are refugees or not], and (2) AfD is run by a lesbian former Goldman Sachs banker. Anti-Nazism is rooted in German education; it took an incredibly foolish decision by Angela Merkel three years ago to make c. 20% of German voters backing an anti-immigrant party. You’d know nothing by reading this piffle of an opinion piece.
11
Let’s remember that the easiest target in any society is the immigrant. Often a voiceless second class citizen, the immigrant, the outsider, can be vilified easily.
Jews are not far behind. It doesn’t matter if like my family; one that settled in what is now Germany in the 1600’s, had deep roots in German soil for generations, fought for the Kaiser in WWI, and who saw themselves as distinctively German. In short order, centuries of Germanic living was twisted into an existence as enemies of the state.
The rise of nationalistic movements today should not come as a surprise. Europe has been inundated with refugees particularly from Northern Africa and the Middle East. People that look different and whose ragged conditions are viewed by some as repulsive and threatening. In the US, this person is the Latin American. Different language, same person. It is a depressing shift in attitude and Jews should wake up and realize, if the attacks continue unabated, we’re next.
America is very much to blame for this worldwide shift. Normally, the United States for all of our missteps, has always been a beacon of tolerance and fairness. The snuffing out of this torch of freedom has essentially given others around the world a green light that now might be a good time to go out and raise bloody hell against the immigrant and while we’re at it, why not our old scapegoat, the Jew.
This epidemic is the most tragic byproduct of Trump’s win. Shutting him up is the 1st step to solving this.
19
Very well stated.
I remember debating my brother when we were teens in the 1970s about whether or not something like that could ever happen in America. I said absolutely not. Never. He more wisely believed that it could happen here or anywhere.
It's a very sad irony that he is a strong Trump supporter today.
3
Visiting Germany as a tourist in the 1970's, I was wandering the city streets and alleys at dusk. Noticing bright lights coming from a long table behind French doors, I saw about 20 people rising for what seem to be a toast. They all raised their arms in the Nazi salute. A chill went through me.
Even then it was not a surprise. Human capacity for chaos and genocide is well documented in history and in today’s media around the world. Just as in the US, then and now “neo”-Nazis under the guise of free speech are claiming the right to attack and kill.
Fundamentally, our ability as humans to work together across differences lifted humans out of the hell of our worst instincts. If the majority allows the Nazi lie and violence in all it disguises to once again destroy civilization, we know the beginnings and end.
Please also present coverage of where and how nations and communities are working together to respect all cultures. In a world of 9.6 billion, they may quiet but they are the vast majority.
4
Jason Stanley's piece is shocking and shameless and it deeply disturbs me that the NYT choose to place its seal of approval on it.
"Some myths are politically useful" Stanley writes. His piece is a demonstration of that truth.
Germans, Stanley insists, through innuendo and anecdote, are constitutionally different from the rest of us. Scratch a German, discover a Nazi.
This is racism and stereotyping. Germans are not different from the rest of us. Genocides have occurred in far flung nations, with genes and histories very different from Germany. Scratch a Cambodian, a Hutu, a Turk, and find a genocidal monster? The NYT would never publish such a piece.
Stanley insists that citizens marched in Chemnitz because they are Nazis. This is nonsense. Citizens marched in Chemnitz because one of their fellows was stabbed to death by migrants, and migrants have contributed greatly to an increase in crime and social decay in Germany and other European nations practicing foolhardy, nearly open borders policies.
Acknowledging the menace created by these policies would not serve Stanley's racism. So he doesn't acknowledge that menace.
Shameful, twisted, bigoted, and false.
24
@Danusha Goska I wonder whether you read the whole piece or were so upset by what you did read that instead of answering his arguments, you call him names.
1
@Larry Zuckerman
Hi, Larry, thank you for reading and commenting. I did read all the way to the end. I did not call him names. If i missed something in the article, please feel free to bring it to my attention. Thank you.
@Danusha Goska
While I believe you are letting the right-wing rioters in Chemnitz off the hook a bit too quickly, it must also be said that they do not represent Germany as a whole.
And thank you very much for expressing your opposition to the anti-German racism promoted by the New York Times, which is sadly not limited to this article. I almost feel like a radical freak for writing this, but I sincerely believe it is true.
2
I must only believe that Hitler's Germany must have won WWII and was never divulged to the American public. Why else would the US Government diagnose citizens mentally ill with superior IQ's and torture college educated graduates with psychotropic drugs as Hitler did. As well, why would a victorious America adapt the technology of a defeated enemy such as the and rocket engines that may have been why Hitler apparently lost the war.
The case of Manfred Stanley will never be settled as long as there is not a "TRUE" reckoning in Germany. And now it seems that the Germans are once again embracing their Nazi underpinnings.
2
@326 -- Those are not "underpinnings."
They are also just as much a danger outside Germany.
It can happen in other parts of Europe, is in fact threatening in some now.
It could happen in the US too, as laid out a century ago in the work of Joseph Conrad, among others (The Iron Heel).
Russia and China and, according to Muslims living there, even the Hindus of India and the Buddhists of Burma are already on that route.
6
What they call Nazi past in Germany is what we call Racist past in the USA.
Different words but identical shameful ideology.
5
5,000 Nazi'sin Chemnitz August 27, but 50,000 to 60,000 in a show of support on the other side, on September 3rd "Wir Sind Mehr" (We are more). Please report a sense of proportion.
16
@4Average Joe
I would translate that as:
"There are more of us."
1
The cruel evil hypocritical immoral inhumane legacy of America's historical black African enslavement and separate and unequal black African Jim Crow is still alive and well in America. That is the root cause of Black LIves Matter and other similar movements.
And while there are more German Americans than any other kind of Americans by ethnic national origin, that is not the only significant white European Judeo-Christian American group that believes in and practices the myth of white supremacist superiority and it's corollary black inferiority. Germany led Europe into two world wars that entangled America. The Republicans won 55%, 59 % and 58 % of the white vote in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections.
The Holocaust was not perpetrated in America by Americans against other Americans. And 40% of the world's 16 million Jews live safe and sound in America. Another 40 % live in Israel.
4
@Blackmamba -- When Jim Crow laws were at their worst, they were also redlining Jews and excluding them from clubs and businesses, and not only in the South. There were very good reasons why Jews were such important participants in the Civil Rights movement for blacks.
8
It's also present in the United States, the Nazi presence, it's ideas and hate.
4
@esp -- That is so small it does not even deserve to be called marginal.
We have our own demons, powerful demons, and we are far from overcoming them.
2
The football coach Bill Parcels had a saying: " You are what your record is." can't we also say, as a country, you are what your history is. The German people have as a part of their historical culpability , 2 world wars and the worst crime ever recorded into the history books of the human race, too often the sins of the Holocaust is seen as washed away with the death of Hitler and Goebbels, Himmler and the SS, but the truth is they had plenty of help, plenty of willing executioners, who came from all walks of life, the only thing they had in common other than the blood on their hands were that they were German.
It is a sin against the dead, a sin against the Anne Franks of that terrible time, when the human race plumed the lowest deaths of human capability, The Grand Parents of these new racists, murdered Children and women in every corner of Europe, their sickening, perverted crimes, stain every acre of that land, and the unjustly murdered cry out all across Europe from their graves from their scattered ashes, they cry out, blood will always cry out for justice. And when the German people begin again to play the Organ of hate, then it can only mean that, either they have forgotten the Holocaust, take no responsibility for it , or think it is a lie. Every one of them should be taken to Aushwitz or Treblinka, every one of them should visit the killing fields of the Ukraine, every one should look at the photos of the slain.
NEVER AGAIN-so says the world.
7
@artfuldodger
When you deny the Holocaust in Germany, you are taken to court. The same happens, when you show Nazi symbols. Just recently a 89 year old woman, Ursula Haverbeck, who, after having received several suspended sentences for denying the Holocaust already, went on doing so, was sent to jail. She tried a complaint against the Grundgesetz, our Constitution, but failed. A former SS-Mann, who had worked as a bookkeeper, was sentenced to jail for supporting the Holocaust as well. These crimes are not forgotten, and that is how it should be, because NEVER AGAIN is ablolutely right.
5
Nazism was not created and spread by Hitler. In every society, there are always some people who do nt do well and are always looking for someone to blame for their situation. Serena and John blamed the referee. Hindus blame muslims for their low standing in the world, Jews blame Arabs, and Arabs blame teh west, and ....The same is happening n "the liberal educated" Sweden as it did in Ialy and France and Poland and Hungary and ....the US. Always blame "not like us" be they rich, be they homeless, be they blacks or hispanics or Chinese or well off Asian immigrants.
3
@Wonderfool Whether the masses start out blaming immigrants or not, xenophobia is a winning ticket for politicians. Divide and conquer.
1
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I used to study my parents bookshelves. There was Eugen Kogons „Der SS-Staat“, a firsthand account of the concentration camp system, published immediatly after the war; „Die Ermittlung“ by Peter Weiss, a stage version of the Auschwitz trials, and „Der Stellvertreter“ by Rolf Hochhuth, a play that critizised pope Pius XII. for not speaking out against the persecution of the Jews - both plays were widely performed in the 60s; all the great works by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, who rose to prominence in the 50s precisely because they wrote about the Third Reich. I often read that Germanys reckoning with it’s Nazi past has only been so recent and I wonder: Who the hell made those books bestsellers, watched those plays - and movies like Bernhard Wickis 1959 fim „Die Brücke“, not to speak of countless documentaries? Who gave Willy Brandt, the anti-Nazi emigré who knelt before the monument for the Warsaw uprising, a clear majority in 1972? The list could go on.
15
I'll leave it to others to argue whether particular ethnic groups are more prone to fascistic tendencies than others, which seems to be an underlying premise of this article. I just wish the Professor had spent more time on the HUMAN tendency to become very tribal and very brutal when fears are stoked.
If we are worried about our future then focusing on one historical atrocity makes it all-too-easy to suggest such type of events only occur when you have a particularly barbaric people. I fear that if the conditions which existed in Germany when Hitler rose to power were to exist in almost any "advanced" country today (including our own), then, though it likely would not sink to the barbaric level of Nazi Germany, it would certainly not be a country I would want to live in.
11
Tribalism is the root of race or ethnic hatred, and that doesn't stop at a nation's borders. So, I think measuring whether a particular society has "faced up" to past national crimes is a little unfair. Most every nation, past or present, has awful things on the record, and there are new things added most every day around the world. It is up to the historians more than anybody to document these occurrences; politicians sway with the winds, and memorials can all too easily be torn down. Germany has reckoned with its murderous deeds and aggression in the Nazi era at least as good as anyone else by the documentation of its historians, and through legal judgments. What more does one need? The current problems have been brought about mainly through political mistakes and the remaining trauma of the time of Germany's existence as a bifurcated state, which lasted much longer than the Nazi government. Transferring the guilt of it to the new generation will not solve anything.
5
The Nazis rose to power in the 1930s by trading on the resentments of Versailles. The current crop of German nationalists are trading on the resentments of Nürnberg.
The MAGA crowd in the United States is animated by resentments of its own (economic, cultural, intellectual), and the 2018 Republican Party is focused 24/7 on feeding those resentments, many of which are fanned by the Carnival Barker's lies and demagoguery.
Anger is a great motivator, whether or not it is justified or based on rational thought.
7
@Brian H. Bragg The Nazis rose to power because of the tremendous damage done to the German economy by the Smoot-Hawley tariff, an American law passed in 1930. The collapse of the German economy in 1932 (25% unemployment) came only a few years after the 1923 collapse of the German mark. Read the early chapters of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".
Dear Prof´.Stanley, already while reading your opinion I knew that the Comment section would not provide sufficient space for all I feel right now and would like to comment. I´ll try anyway.
- For the vast majority of my adult life (59 yrs. , German), our history and the fate of the Jews, Roma, Disabled and Gays of Germany has been hammered into my consciousness - and rightly so.
- How can a country EVER "...reckon with horrendous crimes" like those, my country committed? Should or could there ever be ONE moment or one action or a series of actions which would mark that reckoning? I think not.
- Do you expect that "reckoning with our past" will work like a vaccine, forever immunizing Germany against the ignorance of future generations? Far from it. It will - as it always has been - a constant battle. Just like the US needs to battle white supremacy movements, which you all hoped the US suddenly had overcome, due to just one black President. And Germany will fight that battle.
- Which country has tried so hard to NOT let its past slip into the mist of history as Germany did? Has America ever come to terms with its genocide to Native Americans or its war crimes in the arenas of the globe? I am not trying to go into the "whataboutism" of the Trump-era, I am asking what such a "coming to terms" could possibly look like at all?
- When to so many Americans Berlin is not Hitler’s capital but merely the location of the Berlin Wall I´d say improve your history classes.
28
Actually, Baye's theorem is the culprit in today's Nazi rise. As a German researcher pointed out yesterday, Youtube kept feeding him far right Nazi propaganda when he started looking at Chemnitz. The ALGORITHM, there and here, creates virtual factions. This isn't led by humans, unless you consider the algorithm that brings them together. The same thing makes Bannon "popular", and Alex Jones a "hit". Its the algorithm that feeds the next viewing option.
3
Left out of this discussion is fact that Germany was divided and occupied by its captors for over 40 years. Only because Ronald Reagan felt sorry for the Germans did the division and occupation by
the Soviets end. It should have continued indefinitely to make it clear that Germany could never be allowed to return to a normal functioning state due to the crimes it committed which go much deeper than just one man. Remember that Reagan was the same president who thought it was appropriate to lay a wreath at an SS cemetery in Bitburg.Between this act and FDR's indifference to Jewish asylum seekers, this country has not embraced its sordid history as well. P
Reagan is the idol of today's Republican party. Same party that embraces Donald Trump and white nationalism.
Never forget- my relatives suffered even worse that the author's relatives. The GOP has a Nazi history and Nazi present as well.
3
I wholly agree with Professor Stanley. Bolshevism, Maoism, and Nazism have not been eradicated. As to the Nazis in Germany, their smoldering under the surface can be paraphrased as "The smokestacks are smoking in silence" -- a password of Hitler's opponents. In German, "Die Schornsteine rauchen still".
2
One may discuss the wall and the partition of Germany, or WWII and prewar Germany, or both and contemporary Germany at the same time, without ipso facto concluding that the discussion of one of the three periods necessarily denies or erases the others. But you wouldn't know it from the good professor Stanley's sophistry.
Germany is not the monolith his strawman argument purports it to be. Prewar led to WWII led to partition, which led to acceptance of the past on the West and denial on the East. These two Germanies remain today and that fact is central to Stanley's argument though he does his best to hide it and advance only those parts which support his story.
Quite shocking for a professor of philosophy really, and an explanation for why he's not a professor of history. Because conflation and tropes are quite literally "How Fascism Works,” Professor Stanley.
5
Germans and Jews will never recover from their guilt and their woes. Their thoughts and behaviors will always bear the marks of the past, a past which is not passed, in the words of Wm. Faulkner.
Herr Gauland is not just a Nazi, he is a liar. " no other people have been so clearly presented with a false past as the Germans.” Nonsense. Americans are told that criminals who tried to overthrow the American government in the 19th century were heroes to whom statues should be raised or maintained. In a recent argument I suggested that all such statues should have the word TRAITOR carved on them. My listeners thought I was crazy.
3
Look at these faces. Nazism has never left. It's just been hiding in plain sight, like racism. We have been much too complacent, and we're paying the price, now.
4
One may discuss the wall and the partition of Germany, or WWII and prewar Germany, or both and contemporary Germany at the same time, without ipso facto concluding that the discussion of one of the three periods necessarily denies or erases the others. But you wouldn't know it from the good professor Stanley's sophistry.
Germany is not the monolith his strawman argument purports it to be. Prewar led to WWI led to partition, which led to acceptance of the past on the West and denial on the East. These two Germanies remain today and that fact is central to Stanley's argument though he does his best to hide it and advance only those parts which support his story.
Quite shocking for a professor of philosophy really, and an explanation for why he's not a professor of history. Because conflation and tropes are literally "How Fascism Works,” Professor Stanley.
2
Having lived in Germany for 5+ years, I find this article off-base. AfD IS primarily a 'former East German' problem. In the East, people were not educated in school that 'their' ancestors were responsible for the rise of Nazism, instead 'their' ancestors were the communists who fought against the Nazis. After reunification, many in the East did not get ahead in the new economy, and have been ripe targets for the fascist leaders who give them simple things to blame (the EU, immigrants, etc.). But it is basically ludicrous to think that most Germans think they are a superior race -- I have never felt this in a conversation (unlike the English, for example, where I live now). Europe, like the US, is facing a strong fascist revival that targets the less fortunate, and gives easy scapegoats for people to blame for their suffering. No wonder it is popular now amongst people who are struggling to reach the levels of prosperity that their parents, and neighbors, seem to have. This article doesn't help, in my opinion, to understand the ideological struggle going on in Germany, and Europe. To think this is a return to Nazism is nonsense. Facism, yes -- just like Trump and some populist Republicans are pushing for now in the US. To call US fascists Nazis would be equally absurd, these are 'only' US white supremecists that are scurrying out from their rocks in the new world of 'Fake News' and Fox. That is what we must fight and defeat, in the US and Europe.
7
The headline trumpets that "Germany’s Nazi Past Is Still Present," but I think it is more correct to declare that "Germany's Racist Past is Still Present."
Painting today's racists with the black brush of Nazism is not only inaccurate and unfair, but also extremely lazy.
There are large numbers of racists and bigots in this country, in Australia, Cuba, France, India, England, Israel, India, China, South Africa, the Arab lands, Mynamar, and many more nations.
Are they all Nazis under the skin? I think not. Tribal racists? I think so.
As for those who march around Sig Heiling while embracing the swastika and its variations, they are small but vocal minorities.
8
@LarryAt27N Sadly, you're right.
If my grandfather did some really terrible things, should I feel guilt? Make payments to victims? The Germans gave us the Porsche 911S-How bad can they be. But seriously, they rebuilt from complete rubble after 1945 while knowing what they had done on the Eastern Front to 22 million Russians, "The other Jews." Because of the cold war we never were taught that. America is not perfect, we nuked schoolchildren on their way to school in 1945, had slaves and slaughtered the Indians. We are suppressing the Germans exactly as the Versaille Treaty did. We all know what came next. So order your Carreras early this time, before the war. Then you can say it is pre-war, those will be the valuable ones.
5
Perhaps not specifically a Nazi flashback but rather the universal susceptibility of some groups to believing that their problems are someone else's fault.
2
The society can not erase the past cultural memes from its life by one brush - there is need for long process to achieve that goal. Hitler is dead and Nazisism is dormant, new liberal democracy over last 75 years have created beautiful monuments to present new Germany, but the old cultural memes are still very strong. Let us take one of them - Aryan theory. This theory has been discredited by academic research and now most of the scholars agree that it was a creation of German society to bring respectability and supremacy to German Christian people. The root of the all white supremacy in all white societies is based on this meme. How many intellectuals have tried to discredit this meme and wrote for the truth? The myth of this white supremacy and camouflaged ideas like "American Exceptionalism" are new incarnation of this meme. White society is not sincere for cleansing the past dirt - new approach to find out the memes that are cause of this problem is needed. Otherwise, this evil will erupt again and again and may destroy the white culture and its contribution to humanity.
1
"Some very fine people on both sides" United States President Donald statement about neo-Nazis protesting in Charlottesville. :(
11
take, for the sake of argument, the question of the mass, systematic murder of Jews off the table. Think, instead, of the tens of thousands who were imprisoned and murdered before implementation of the final solution. This is what also needs to be discussed. Think of the purpose of Dachau and its labor camps, and to the others inside Germany before the death and labor camps became large-scale murderous locations. It was a relatively short walk from "you are the wrong party" to "you are the wrong group"; scapegoating, in service to a polis never works in the long run, but it does usher people to their deaths.
1
Germany has been far, far better at facing its national sins than has any of its neighbors. See Austria, for example, and its self-styled victimhood. Or France's long denial of complicity. Or consider Czech amnesia about the genocidal expulsion of millions of Sudeten Germans. Or look at Poland's recent efforts to whitewash its image. And don't forget Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Hungarian, Slovak, and even Dutch and Norwegian culpability. And why even bother mentioning Japan, Russia, China, or the United States. None of this is to downplay the horrors of the Holocaust. But on balance, if any country can be held up as a model for national atonement, it's Germany.
11
@Paul
True, but it took the passing of a generation before Germany really made the effort to reckon with its history. As late as the 1980's, many Germans did now welcome such discussion.
1
@Paul An institutionalized, intellectualized model of atonement can't change an ethnic propensity for hatred of the "other", be it German or Japanese or Swiss (especially Swiss) or Polish, and on and on.
1
Being part of an elite group - genetically, racially, philosophically, perhaps mystically - had and has an attraction for disaffected, disenfranchised individuals who have been stripped of their power by forces beyond their control: the poorly educated in a land where public education is failing, the unemployed in a country where economic Darwinism is the accepted economic model, the jealous, the envious who see others leading meaningful productive lives all around them - lives which are unattainable to them.
Hitler's Sturmabteilung - his paramilitary group, the SA - were often referred to as gangsters. And indeed its ranks were filled with desperate men who could not find work as Germany struggled under the burden of their reparations to the French after WWI, resulting in a moribund economy with high inflation - people were trapped, no way out, they were literally starving. Crime and jail were seen as a more preferable alternatives to starving in the street.
And in Orwellian theory, you always need an enemy, a scapegoat, an identifiable cause for your suffering, a distraction - and in the best case scenario, a war that will solve all your problems: unemployment, hunger, lack of self-esteem, lack of purpose, lack of social-political-group affiliation.
Negative economic and social conditions are more prevalent in the US than in Germany. But in Germany, ordinary people are rejecting the traditional liberal-democratic model that they perceive not to be working for them.
Before we start talking about Germany's Nazi Past, maybe we should start to discuss our own. We have politicians Today who are spending the fortunes made illegally trading with the Nazi party. We have another article "Looking Our Racist History in the Eye" documenting our Nazi past that we can't even comment on in the NY Times. We still have children in our 'concentration camps' that haven't seen their parents in over 6 months and may never see them again. Our (German Nazi & American Racists) past never died, it isn't even past.
8
It is important that you look at your own country before you make any judgements on others.
In the US, fascism is dramatically on the rise and because of Trumps embrace iof Nazi’s and his non stop fear mongering, the whole Republican party, his base is fully agreeing with him.
That makes for 33% of the American voting public supporting his neo-fascist movement, which is a larger percentage than the same movement in Gemany.
This dramatically rise all over the world is caused by pure fear mongering by dictators the world over, people like Putin, Trump, Sisi in Egypt, Dictators in Turkey, Fillipines, China, Israel, etc etc.
Very easy to blame other countries, but you better start looking closer at home first.
9
Jason Stanley, are you thankful for anything or to anybody? You sound so bitter and ungrateful. The German government provided you with an excellent and free education, an education good enough for you to land in the US as a professor in an Ivy League University.
I am hardly bibelfest, but I do not believe in demanding guilt for 7 generations, as my German father was constantly reminded of during his few years working in the US. What purpose does all this guilt serve other than debilitating shame?
The Germans that I know, myself included, feel deeply ashamed, saddened and horrified by the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. I was born in 1950. I have carried this shame and guilt for 68 years even though I was born 6 years after the end of WW2.
I am truly sorry, but I have also decided that enough is enough!
21
What Germany has done to the Jewish Race some 80 years ago is just unbelievable, and I am most regretful about it, being a German. I also dont want to fall into excuses, citing historical misdeeds of other countries. Germanys atrocities were horrible, Germany lost the war, which is recent history and Germany paid dearly. As unfortunate it is, what happened has happened, the ones resposible for it are no longer alive and Germany is facing its Past openly.
Stiring up this Past over and over is not fair to the new Generation of Germans, who think like me.
Talking about the new rightist AfD Party, these People are overrated and will not prevail. Their sudden rise is Immigration Policy related, which must be debatable in any Democracy. Opening the Gates for hundredthousands of Immigrants within a short Period. leads to controversies in any Country. But there is no anti-semitism in this Country, if you disregard isolated cases, which you find
everywhere. Germany is a constituional Democracy since 1949. The interaction with Israel and their citizens ist
most respectful. It goes so far, that People donot use the word Jew, but rather refer to an Individual of Jewish Origin -
or Germany does not even dare to critizise Israel, regardless of their Palastine Policy and Treatment of Arab Citizens.
60
@Rolf Schmid Judaism is not our "race'; it's our religion.
1
@Rolf Schmid
You may be interested to know that Jews--or, as you put it, individuals of "Jewish Origin"--are NOT and NEVER have been a race. Judaism is now and always has been a religion. Just as those of "Christian Origin" are not a race. Or those of "Muslim Origin" are not a race. They are believers in a set of ethical and spiritual practices-- and are known as Christians and Muslims.. and Jews. There are three races in the world--Caucasian, Asian, and Black. And guess what? There are Jews in all of them. Calling Jews a race leads to all sorts of problems, many of which were experienced in Germany then, and, if this article is correct, are still being experienced now.
@Rolf Schmid
A few points, please. By "not" citing historical misdeeds of others you are indirectly doing just this. To be clear, there have been no parallels to what happened in the Holocaust - such sophistication and immorality... and others, of course, paid more dearly than did the Germans - and they didn't directly (at least) instigate it. Also, those responsible are not all dead, yet. Blaming Germans for what their ancestors did is clearly wrong, especially for all those of us living in glass houses. Finally, if some of the sentiments that allowed the Holocaust return in Germany, it obviously would not likely involve Jews, even if there were more living there (we generally get to use the easy term "Jew" here because it's not 'understood' to be derogatory, fortunately.)
1
As a Secular Humanist, someone who does not believe in any god and believes in equal rights for all human beings, I read this article with familiar sorrow and wonder: Why has the belief in the God of Abraham been used to justify so much misery in humanity since His creation by a small nomadic Bronze Age tribe: From the earliest slaughter of pagans in Jericho by Jews; to the slaughter of Muslims, Catholics and Protestants by each other; of Jews by Nazi Germans; of Muslims in Palestine by Israelis...and on and on? Even posing that question here is certain to incite fury among many readers. But I've been asking it for 70 years, since I was a very young child first learning history, and I still have no answer. Why?
2
@Lois Manning
I'll take your question literally and give you an answer, based on modern understanding of science and evolution.
Science magazine had a special issue on human conflict http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/conflict/index.xhtml in which they asked scientists from all disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, and political science, to explain why.
The short answer is that humans (and animals) have always massacred each other, in conflicts over resources. Humans have evolved to cooperate in small groups, and the first essential goal is to protect the group from attack. Unfortunately one of the most effective mobilizing techniques is hate and fear of the enemy. Peace leads to cooperation; war leads to hate and fear.
The optimistic answer is that in humans (and animals) conflict is followed by reconciliation. The examples in Science were South Africa, Ireland, and the U.S.-Soviet arms race and Cuban missile crisis. These conflicts were resolved by non-government actors on both sides, like scientists, who used their common goals to reach reconciliation.
Specifically on your point is the article, "Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict," by Scott Atran (who has also written for the NYT), who has insights into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. South African and Irish peace negotiators offered to help the Israelis, but Netanyahu brushed them aside.
It's too bad that Jason Stanley couldn't reach reconciliation with the Germans.
1
Goethe said if each person sweeps in front of their door, the whole city is clean.
As Americans, we should be concerned with improving America.
When your German friends ask about the genocide of native Americans, and the carpet bombing of South Vietnam - they may have a point.
In Germany, Holocaustleugnung (public denial of the holocaust) is a crime. In American westerns, the cowboys are the good guys and the Indians the bad guys. The civilians killed by American bombs are very rarely reported in the media.
14
I am very sorry about the suffering of your family. I can sympathize to some extend, not only jewish people were killed. However I am 52 now, my parents passed away years ago. I do believe that the story of your family should always be heard. There will always be a shadow on the “German Nation”, and there should be so that we do not forget and can share with future nations what can happen if you take advantage of fear and seminate hate.
I do not believe in genes creating a culture. We are talking about a geographical area composed by a variety of cultures, with one of the highest immigration rates in the world. It is working well, Germany has one of the most liberal society I know. I lived in several countries, now in the USA for 8 years. I still work and travel to Germany regularly.
Germany is facing an immigrant crisis caused by over 800,000 Syrian immigrants that entered the country in 2015. It is doing a fairly good job. Yes there are Nazis that organized themselves and there is a party that takes advantage of the fear of people. I am shocked that some of these people marched with Nazis in Chemnitz. They feel marginalized, and maybe not prepared for a competitive economy.
All this has nothing to do with the suffering of your family. To mix the past up with the present is misleading and does not embrace the complexity of increasing immigration.
14
@Chris
Of course, if the U.S., Israel, and their allies hadn't promoted and supported the Syrian civil war, Germany wouldn't have 800,000 Syrian immigrants in the first place.
1
I was fortunate enough to be stationed twice in Germany in Mannheim and Kaiserslautern. First time from 2000-2003 then 2006 till 2010. I made it a point to visit historic landmarks that shed light on Germany's dark horrific past like Dachau to Checkpoint Charlie where at the Berlin Wall divided the country's people and its soul. Even had the opportunity to visit some former East German bases in former East Berlin. It is a stark reminder of the Holocaust and the lead up to it can happen here and abroad. Citizens will turn to Far Right candidates because they will promise them safety, a national identity based on racial purity, and scapegoats to take out their frustrations on. Here in the USA, we elected a president that played on whites deep seated racial resentment against minorities, scapegoated Latinos and illegal immigrants as the cause of our problems. We wrapped it up in a message of MAGA that resonated with his political base. Authoritative figures are often elected through fear, bigotry, and economic malaise. Finally, the dark horrors of genocide are never to far from the lips and ears of fearful men.
8
I am curious as to why now. What has shifted? Germany has had people from Turkey living and working there since the 1960s, and as part of the EU - Germany has scores of non-Germans (of all backgrounds) from all over Europe living and working there and they been unified for over 25 years? Reading new stories back in the '80s and 90's one got the impression that Nazi's were all but extinct.....so what has changed?
@Here's the Thing
a short answer which - no doubt - will do full justice to your question, which would require a long thesis.
What has changed?
a.) Unification happened. As a result there came 17 mio who did not go through any process of "reckoning". Quite the opposite. b.) Eastern Germany still feels "2nd class" compared to the West, offering great opportunities for the Right to capitalize on feelings of victimization. c.) Immigration of a huge group of refugees, culturally far more removed from Europe than turkish people. The fear of "Immigrants get all the ressources!" (Sounds familiar, doesn´t it?) The irony: Eastern Germany has taken far less Immigrants than many places in western Germany. My question in return would be: I watched what happened in Charlottesville. Has the US collectively joined the KKK? (Of course not, I know.)
1
@Here's the Thing
What has changed is that the heretofore mostly invisible cohort of closeted neo-Nazis have not, until now, felt it safe to come out of their closets and march in the streets in such large numbers to show their true colors. What has changed is that the closeted neo-Nazis now feel it is safe for them to again have their "side" openly spoken and given the respect that they believe they have always deserved but have been silenced by, in their minds, "oppressive" anti-fascists. What has changed is much the same as what changed in Germany in 1933 when the oppressed proto-Nazis discovered a man who gave voice to their belief and feelings for the "wrongs" that Good Germans had had to endure since the treasonous surrender of Germany to the the Allies.
"The past is not dead. It is not even the past." And though it may be buried, it still lives, like zombies rising from the grave. It is everywhere, in Germany, in Europe, in Israeli, in the USA.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"And so it goes", in the Kurt Vonnegut sense of the phrase.
1
Histories wounds can never really be healed; Germany appears to have done a better job than most. Right wing elements exist in all societies, German people are no different than anyone else.
6
The Holocaust. Never forget. Never ever forget. Seems simple enough. The rise of the alt right movement in Germany needs to be monitored closely and the lessons learned from the rise of the Nazi party to it's destruction in 1945 need to be studied, discussed asnd embedded in the history of the country. There is no magic date or time when such horrific crimes against humanity are simply relegated the pages of dust collecting history books. It has a life of it's own and never diminishes in importance.
2
Homo sapien's political boundaries are relatively unimportant (except to the individual animal and his or her tribe) when considering the essence of our species. These boundaries are no more or less than the scent boundaries, for instance, of other animals. Trying to make more of them will just drive you nuts,
1
I decided long ago that I could never forgive Germany for its Nazi past because I always believed that it was still there below the surface. I have traveled all over the world, been to almost every country in Europe, but I never have nor never will travel to Germany. Remember, Hitler was elected and supported by most Germans. I cannot justify spending my money in a country that conducted systemic genocide.
2
@LHS
As understandable as the resentments as those expressed in these pretty common type of hateful comments are, maybe the most understandable resentments in the world for historical reasons, they still work like all resentments: they lead to bias, distorted perceptions of reality, unfair generalisations and an illogical thinking in collective and inherited guilt you would never even think of applying to your own.
I wonder sometimes, is this kind of thinking an unintended or welcome result of in some regards well-intentioned, but obviously biased and misleading articles like this?
Or maybe, is it the hidden emotional source for the authors of such articles themselves, hidden behind more careful wording? Maybe it's a good thing as it can lead to something like a "healthy alarmism" at times, but I'm not too sure about this. I'm not too sure if attitudes like this should be actively nourished.
1
@LHS, please educate yourself by reading about all the peoples and countries in the world that have committed what you seem to ascribe only to Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
You’ll quickly see that there are many other countries you should have excluded from your travels. Jews, sadly, have been persecuted for millennia, but are not unique. If you have never been to Germany, how can you judge? You say you cannot forgive, conversely, is it your expectation that all Germans born after the war should carry guilt forever? I don’t think either is a beneficial attribute in the long run, and does not move us forward. I think it is time to move on and try to make this complex, wonderful and endangered world a better place.
2
We need a thorough, unbiased, non-polemical analysis of the rise of nationalist and far-right movements in Europe. This very personal, emotional and yes, biased article (while perfectly understandable based on the author's background) fails that test.
In Berlin, the Typography of Terror Museum exists not far from the tourist heavy Checkpoint Charlie dealing with the Wall. The former deals unhesitatingly and without evasion with the rise of Nazism and its hellish viewpoints, and crimes. Prof. Stanley nitpicks and says its not publicized enough. Many tourists are turned off by history in general and "difficult" issues, and skip it. Are Germans to be blamed, Prof.?
Then we have the AfD. They are rightfully pariahs in both the Bundestag (lower house of parliament), and in the regional parliaments of the German states in which they've secured some seats. All parties have refused to deal with them. They are under a hundred seats in a 700 seat Bundestag. Forget to mention that, Prof.?
A decent respect for history requires us to remember all victims from Wounded Knee to Jim Crow to the uncounted millions of Russians killed directly or indirectly by the Nazi invasion of WW II in their homeland. Some of us cannot and will not go down the path of valuing victims of tyrannical oppression on some scale of more or less worthy, as you seem to do, sir.
The German people have taken this very seriously. But for you Professor abject apologies, admissions of guilt, and
8
@Unworthy Servant My posted comment was cut-off by my software at the end. The ending was "and changes of outlook and national attitude by Germans will always be judged inadequate."
I cannot help but feel that Professor Stanley has some overcoming to do. I too have lived and studied in Germany, and have followed German politics for 50 years. I can only say that this column exudes a sense of grievance which is insatiable and much cherished, aside from the fact that it engages in wallowing in what can only be deemed the imputation of collective guilt. The “Holocaust Industry” has been running full blast for a generation or more. No one wants to minimize the unspeakable crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany. And no one serious now doubts the complicity of large swaths of the Reich’s population. But look at the US under Trump! Mankind is fated to engage in a never ending struggle against the demons of its own nature. But maybe it’s time to forgive and forget? And let go of this bone.
6
Mr. Stanley, since you are a scholar of this subject, you certainly should have noticed that the rise of authoritarianism is a worldwide phenomena going far beyond Germany and Europe today. In contrast with Hungry, Poland, and now nearly Sweden, have fallen to far right parties with proto-authoritarian leaders. To be honest, American has also fallen with the election of Trump but Trump is no Hitler just because he is too incompetent. We should not neglect the chance that a more competent far right leader would rise at home. Looking beyond Europe and America, the same phenomena is fermenting in Asia too. While it is not clear how long Germany can hold up, I think that it is counter-productive to target Germany for their past crimes today because far right proto-Fascist parties are growing EVERYWHERE. Our task, and hopefully with insights from scholars like you, is how to counter it before the world burns.
6
Why not write about those elements in your own religion that were a grounding for Islam and the disruption Islamic immigration has had in European countries like Germany?
We all need to take a close look at the forces that are driving us in the West to think the way we do.
www.InquiryAbraham.com
1
RE: "Much of the world seemed surprised by the riots that erupted in Germany late last month"
Many in the US are still fighting the Civil War, almost twice as old as the Nazi's.
In the Middle East and other regions in the world conflicts between people hundreds and thousands of years old still serve as the basis for hatred against others.
How little different are we from the other warring primates of this planet. How little we value progress and cling to conflict. No wonder some don't believe evolution.
2
In my opinion the author has a very blurred vision of Germany in 2018.
Unfortunately Germany, like the U. S., has to deal with populists like AfD right now. Over the years there have been many others like DVU, The Republicans etc. They are all history, because our democracy is strong.
But, the people stand up against these right-wingers. After Chemnitz, there have been huge demonstrations, concerts expressing our opposition against nazism. And Chemnitz is not to be singled out. If Nazis are marching, you have to search for them, because they simply disappear in the opposing crowds.
With this in mind, his claim to be a regular visitor to Germany in is hard to believe, since this piece of opinion would have been appropriate in the early 80ies, but not in 2018.
Understanding his personal history, I see some of his claims. Corroborating his view with quotations from a century ago in my opinion is weltfremd at best.
6
The similarity between Germany and the US are obvious. The white majority that has experienced overwhelming power abd advantage has invented a story that portays them as victims—especially prevalent amongst its older citizens. Owe woe is us. We shoukd all rush back to what made us great during WW II.
1
How interesting. In 1980, just as the USSR was self-destructing and money needed to be hidden in the West, suddenly the people who were in their twenties during the Third Reich decide that "time's up", and they could now ignore the horror they unleashed on humanity, If history tells us anything, it is that Germany was far better off before 1871, when it was a disorganized handful of weak city-states and little principalities. In fact, that looks like a good model for what is now called "Saudi Arabia".
You write, when describing the resurgence of right-wing extremism coupled with neo-Nazism in Germany: "All of this is hard for Americans to understand." How can this be hard for Americans to understand? If Charlottesville and Trump's reaction to it (as well as that of his supporters) tell us anything, it's that the US, after more than 150 years, still hasn't come to grips with its own racist, slavery-holding past. France has a successful anti-immigrant political party that is based on racism. So does the UK, and that racism is partially responsible for Brexit. At the moment a candidate for the governorship of Florida believes African-Americans owe their liberty to whites. What is so hard to understand?
6
Today's "neo-Nazis" have no idea what National Socialism -- or fascism -- are really about. These people are burning with one passion: racism and xenophobia. They have no understanding of fascism as a political and economic principle, how it seeks to concentrate all forms of power into a few hands, from which it isn't easy to wrest it back if those hands turn out to be incompetent or evil.
In other words, it might be a better idea to get comfortable with a Syrian living in the apartment next door than to get your wish of a return to the "good old days" of Nazism.
1
Great article.
Germany’s efforts to atone for the sins of their past is admirable, but I believe that forcing people to pay for crimes they did not personally commit based on their geographical location is part of the problem we’re seeing right now.
Holding an entire nationality or race responsible for the acts of their ancestors isn’t justice. For the average hardworking German it probably just makes them resentful. And banning the use of words, gestures and symbols doesn’t make people understand why they shouldn’t be used, they only know they’ll be punished for using them. So when all is said and done you’ve given them something to rebel against and a way to do it.
I’ve been watching the rise of AfD for a while now, along with the ascent of other far right wing parties across Europe. Germany's past is not the problem here. If it were, this would not be happening elsewhere.
When you call decent people Nazis, Nazis start to think they’re decent people - and far greater in number. When you ostracize people and call them bigots because they have genuine concerns about immigration, crime and jobs, you put them on the enemy's side and create an indomitable voting bloc.
4
When we talk about Germany, we talk about two cultures that haven't full melded yet. I've spent a good deal of time in the area of Chemnitz, which is down by the Czech border and used to be a mining district, part of East Germany. Berlin is quite different, especially West Berlin. The traditions of democracy took hold in West Germany quickly. Obviously not in the East. I find most West Germans quick to admit their shame and revulsion for what happened in the 30-40s, and that's also true of West Germans who've moved to East Germany since reunification.
Austria scares me a great deal more. I've lived in Vienna as well as in Berlin. I actually had somebody of my generation in Vienna say to me, "When history is written, we will regard Hitler like we regard Napoleon." This man, an insurance broker, meant it, too.
8
My parents lost their homeland in WW2 and came to Canada in 1952 and like many others of that time, held a nostalgic vision of the Vaterland that didn't evolve the way Germany's did.
We were made to speak German at home and friends of the family were all not only other Germans but Germans of the proper class. Our neighbors in the rural community in which we lived were referred to as the Proletariat.
In the sixties and seventies we were contacted by wealthy, extremely right wing Germans with barely concealed Nazi leanings seeking to settle in a more receptive political and social environment than the one they found in Germany at that time. They found that environment in Alberta.
James Keegstra, a high school teacher and mayor of Eckville preached his Holocaust denials to his students, was convicted of hate speech, which was overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal and reinstated by the Supreme Court of Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Keegstra
"Finally someone has the courage to tell the truth," was the common refrain from many in the community.
I'm not at all surprised Germany's Nazi past, a smoldering ground fire of hatred, is rising into open air in modern Germany. There are places in the world where it has been burning freely all along. I know. I've met those people in my father's living room. I've heard the songs of the Hitler Youth not knowing what they were until later. It still chills my soul.
80
@Memi von Gaza
I am very surprised that this comment was recommended by the editors. Whatever emigrated nazi circles you grew up in, it is not representative of present-day Germany, and probably not even of immediate post-war Germany. This comment, and many of your other comments on the other "Germans-are-still-nazis" type of NYT articles, are interesting personal accounts, but ultimately serve to stereotype my girlfriend, my little brother, my parents, my old friends from high school, and many other people who do not deserve it. Growing up with stories of friends from school being violently assaulted and insulted as "nazis" on trips to England, simply for being German, I have little sympathy for the kind of sensationalism that your comments satisfy.
2
@Andreas,
My antipathy towards the Nazi leanings I observed in Alberta, and those back in Germany in the early seventies cannot be directed at Germans at large, and I don't offer them as such. What I do say is that these leanings still exist, not to satisfy any kind of sensationalism, but to state an important truth.
My comments, as you say, are interesting personal accounts but as such, have every right to be included in a discourse of the subject whether or not they add to the stereotyping of people who don't deserve it.
I didn't deserve being singled out in Grade five and asked by the teacher why Germany was such a war mongering nation, my brothers beaten up for being dirty Germans, but I learned to shrug that off. I didn't accept that stereotype and haven't accepted any other since.
1
That famous phrase of “Never Again” should have pertained to both sides of the equation. That this was never the intention was evident from the start with only one side of the story ever being presented. So here we are again in this familiar place and with just the one big difference, that this time around, the entire world will be waking up to this light.
3
Most of us tend to think ourselves immune from such Nazi-esque tendencies. And we have no trouble condemning it because we associate it with someone else. But each of us is capable of both good and evil passions. It's all a matter of which one we let take control. With my own emotions, I've found that I tend to lose control in crowd situations, where I get swept up in the crowd emotions. So I tend to avoid protests, even when I agree with the cause. Each of us must know his/her own self and avoid those things that bring out the bad passions - our lesser angels, if you will.
Stress situations can also cause those evil passions to show themselves. As a society, we are showing that it doesn't take much stress for a sizable percentage of us to take the dark path. We lash out at those that would place the least stress on our lifestyle and culture.
Given that, I hate to think what will happen when we have a flood of climate refugees at our doorstep. It will be "The Walking Dead" come to real life. Some of our society have already anticipated such a day, and have assembled their arsenals.
I think it's important to recognize that such possibilities exist, and to picture ourselves immersed in them. How would we react? Which angel would we let take control?
3
Made me think of the elderly Southern ladies for whom the Civil War seems to have never ended, who actually said this: "but we (her family) treated our slaves well." You (your family) still owned other humans and denied them their freedom. When only white people discuss and attempt to reconcile slavery without including black people.
2
My first real language was German, largely raised when very young by our German nanny, a refugee from the Bund at the end of WWII when she would have been bred to SS officers to produce more young Nazis. We were living in Frankfurt, where my father, a career Navy officer who spent the war in the Pacific, was in counterintelligence-the worst kind, though he would never speak of it and I only learned about it many years later. My memories of those early years in Germany were not good, and for many years, I swore I would never return. Learning of the Holocaust and having innumerable Jewish friends reinforced that.
Yet, in 1988 and again in 1994, my quarter German, all-Greek wife and I did just that. We visited many cities, always taking care to seek out Synagogues, memorials, and other reflections of its Nazi past. Sure, there were things like the Tolerance of Terror Museum in Berlin, the concentration camp remains, Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, some not easy to find. And we still have pieces of the bunker where Hiter killed himself, still wide open on our last visit, now covered over by a huge commercial development.
But we also saw any number of memorials in both countries to the German soldiers of that war. A plaque to tank troops who had fought the Americans in Freiburg, a lovingly recreated machine gun group in A Heidelburg museum, a side altar in the Votivkirche in Vienna. The evil past remains present there, bubbling under the surface as it does in white America.
4
Before reading this piece I had just finished Margaret Renkl's piece in the Times entitled "Looking our racist History in the eye". I was struck by the similarity of the message (or lecture?) in both. That lecture is, of course, that Caucasian men have done a lot of terrible things - which is undeniable of course - but much more important to the authors is the (to them) undeniable assertion that the sons of those who committed those atrocities are just as racist and anti-Semitic as their fathers and that the sons' refusal to live a perpetually penitent life of shame and guilt only proves the authors' point. I am very much aware of the atrocities committed by the white race but the morally superior and smug implication that white males are the only group capable of such behavior shows an almost willful ignorance of History. Perhaps the authors would someday care to write about the slaughters in Rwanda, Cambodia, Chicago, and other innumerable atrocities committed by groups that weren't white - but I doubt it as it doesn't fit with their increasingly tiresome agenda.
6
The headline from Die Zeit has been incorrectly translated. In the original German the headline reads "Droht Deutschland ein neues 1933?" The subject of the sentence is not "Germany" ("Deutschland") but rather "a new 1933" ("ein neues 1933"). In this case, the verb "to threaten" ("drohen") generally uses the dative case with its objects; its meaning can be construed more along the lines of "to be threatening to" or "to be threatened with (or by)." Since "1933" is not used with the dative case in this question, it can only be the subject (and "Germany" must therefore be the object). A more fitting translation, then, would be:
"Does a new 1933 threaten Germany?" The issue of agency is significant: Germany isn't doing the threatening; it is potentially being threatened by 1933-redux.
Inasmuch as language is the key to culture, the German language reflects its culture's predilection for precision--from train schedules to philosophy to, tragically, death camps. Mistranslation matters.
8
@voelteer: Mistranslation matters indeed. A sincere "Thank You" from Germany. - We are aware of the threat. Always have been. But the fact that evil is raising its head again, does not mean that Germany will not fight it. We will.
5
@Wolfgang As an Israeli, I sincerely hope so.....I really do!!!
@voelteer
You are correct about the mistranslation. "Germany / Deutschland" is in the dative case. One might also translate the title as "Is Germany Menaced by a New 1933?" or "Is a New 1933 Imminent in Germany?"
The author of the article, Michael Wildt, professor of 20th Century German history at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, answers the question he has asked in the negative. Die Zeit online, 8. September 2018 (www.zeit.de).
There was no chasing down of immigrants, proven by the fact that nobody was injured - even our government, which loves this Anti-Fa narrative, was unable to produce any victim of that imaginary occurence.
What's real though is that muslim illegal immigrants regularly stab people now, often do death, something that was extremely rare in our country, now it happens daily.
What's also real is a new anti-semitism in Germany - perpetrated by muslims, many of them with German citizenship so they show up as Germans in the statistics.
Ridiculous pieces like this, which are dominant in our own media as well, are exactly the reason why the AfD keeps gaining ground. The brainwashing by the coalition of media and political establishment (government as well as the fake opposition) is working fairly well on most Germans, but a significant minority saw through it. Unfortunately, not enough to turn around our country before it's too late.
3
I respect this piece as an expression of Mr. Stanley's feelings. However, as a NYT opinion piece read by millions of international readers, I feel that it has serious shortcomings which must be addressed.
The claim that Germans are somehow dealing with a sanitized, or "curated" version of the past is plainly false. On the contrary, the crimes of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front have been widely publicized at least since the 1990s and are also taught to school children, in graphic detail. Also, the image of a comfy and purely inner-German phony dialogue about the past is false, a rebuttal may start with the fact that the Berlin holocaust memorial was designed by an American Jew and end with an explanation of "Aktion Sühnezeichen" and various international youth exchange programs.
Apart from these falsehoods, he describes unrelated observations (attitudes towards Greece, recent right-wing protests, and a politician in the 1980s daring to even talk about non-Jewish German suffering), and spuriously links all of that to a deep-seated uncured nazi spirit in the German people, rather than putting things into a present-day international context. Sorry, but this is not serious journalism.
What I find most troubling is his blatant promotion of a unique standard by which to judge Germany and Germans. I thought that the US election of Trump has put an end to this particular type of American moral hypocrisy.
20
@Andreas
I could not agree more. Thx!
3
@Andreas
The US has the stain of racism still visible in the middle of its forehead, and is in no position to discuss the stain of Nazism in Germany.
In 2018 blacks are murdered in broad daylight with impunity, not even drawing manslaughter indictments.
In the last handful years it was in Charlottesville, Virginia not in Munich, Bavaria where Racists killed a woman running over her with a car, it was in Sutherland Springs, Texas not in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg where Racists went in a murderous rampage killing twenty six, and it was in Charleston, South Carolina, not in Leipzig, Saxony, where Racists murdered nine in a church.
Racism and Nazism are equally inhuman and the US has no standing to criticize Racism in Germany. In the US Racism never abated.
1
Greetings from Germany / Hamburg ...
With all respect for Prof. Stanley, I see his opinion as being very one-sided. From where I stand, he is blowing the story well out of proportion. The city of Chemnitz that made it into the international news recently is not Germany. And many people from Chemnitz resent the actions of the far right and stood up against it. Funnily enough there is no mentioning of the support concert that happened 3 days later in Chemnitz with some 65000 !!! people attending to protest against the right wing fraction and their actions. In Germany we have a population of some 82.7m people and you will find a broad political spectrum US Americans are not used to. There is everything form the far left to the far right represented (some 20 political parties in Germany at present). Currently we see in Germany as well as in Europe, that the political right fractions have gained momentum, because the established parties have failed to deliver concepts to deal with many of the existing and growing problems in our societies. It is on us to change that momentum. I am afraid that Prof. Stanley is focused on a vision of Germany and Europe that has so never really existed and his views are biased by it. He is more then welcome to come over here to verify his comments, if he wishes so. Germany today is an economical global player that is closely tied to its neighbors and international allies including the US. And even your POTUS is not gonna change that.
11
So many of the critical comments here follow the strategy of distraction. "Yes," they say, "but what about the USA (UK, Israel, etc.) and its crimes?" But to respond this way is to miss the point of Professor Stanley's contribution, which is to attack the myth that Germany above all others has confronted its past crimes. Not so, says the author.
3
There is a reality in Germany that the good professor has glossed over, while simultaneously raging over. Germany became today's Germany well after the wall fell, that is during living memory of the majority of Germans today. And the country remains in many ways 2 Germanys : including unresolved Nazi sympathies in the former Eastern Germany. Not that a neonazi movement doesn't also exist in the west, but it is clearly a different phenomenon in most ways in the East.
The wall is living memory to many whereas WWII not to mention prewar is now officially history to almost everyone, everywhere. The author could simply recognise that a prewar history, WWII and living memory can coexist and constitute separate, or comprehensive subjects. Instead of having that discussion though, he simply rails against his own strawman portayals of German discussions of its own past. Overlooking the central fact of the story of Berlin removes some credibility from an author who purports to have strong roots and even life experience in Germany. The tension of his blinkered commentary caused me to stop reading after several paragraphs of what appears to me as sentimental recollection and reductive reasoning, rather than what could have been personal lived insights.
Perhaps I'll go back and finish the article, but I think I've already concluded not everyone is cut out to be a writer.
4
@Andy
And this guy wants to sell a book...
I can strongly recommend "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder - 20 lessons from the 20th century, very well written. In my opinion A must read!
2
Good heavens but there is a lot of "whataboutery", false equivalence, and excuse making in this comment section.
The author raises excellent, difficult points. And an objective reading forces an uncomfortable look at the past of other countries - here the USA. (And, of course, Britain, surely has much to answer for after its empire days in India and Africa, but one never really hears about that process happening - interesting.)
The drawing of the clear and undeniable parallel between the National Socialists (Nazi's) and modern white supremacists may rankle some. But having even a basic knowledge of the 3rd Reich and how it came to be should send shivers down everyone's spine.
And while over-personalizing one's experience in order to support a premise is logically flawed (e.g., an anecdote does not make a point), I applaud this writer for being open and sharing the experience. A moving, hair-raising read.
2
@Homer
One need not engage in whataboutery to make a legitimate critique of the good professor. One may discuss the wall and the partition of Germany, or WWII and prewar Germany, or both and contemporary Germany at the same time, without ipso facto concluding that the discussion of one of the three periods necessarily denies or erases the others. But you wouldn't know it from the good professor Stanley's sophistry.
Germany is not the monolith his strawman argument purports it to be. Prewar led to WWI led to partition, which led to acceptance of the past on the West and denial on the East. These two Germanies remain today and that fact is central to Stanley's argument though he does his best to hide it and advance only those parts which support his story.
Quite shocking for a professor of philosophy really, and an explanation for why he's not a professor of history. Because conflation and tropes are literally "How Fascism Works,” Professor Stanley.
2
My husband and I visited Munich, Germany in 1972. Germany is a beautiful country. Munich was a beautiful city, but one day looking out our hotel window I was reminded of its' past when I saw a group of young men on motorbikes wearing swastika armbands. I am a Jew. I was very frightened. Obviously Nazism was alive and well at that time.
On the other hand, in the 1990s I worked as a docent at the Jewish Museum in Philadelphia and one day had the real pleasure of taking a young group of German students on a tour of the synagogue and the museum. They wished to learn more about the people their ancestors had treated so brutally.
It is important to remember the past. It is important for us to remember the way people of color were, and in many cases still are, treated in our own country. We must learn from our past and not try to gloss it over. I am scared now to see what I perceive as a rise in bigotry in our country. Our leaders are not doing enough to stop it. It was not difficult for Hitler to turn his adopted country into a country of hate. We must be ever on our guard against that.
4
There is much not included in this discussion--understandable because it is such a complex, multi-faceted history. I reject the broad brush generalizations of Germans or any people. Nonetheless, I write as the daughter of German immigrants who came to the US after WWII, who will forever feel shame for the horrors committed against Jews by Germans.My father was the son of a minister. At sixteen, my father was drafted into the army where he served as an officer (to oppose would have been to sign a death warrant). His parents were not Nazis, and, in fact, his father was a member of the "Confessing Church" which worked to try to undermine Hitler (recall Dietrich Bonhoeffer--hanged for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.) Obviously their efforts were not enough. My father was among those who fought on the Russian front--in Bashkiria. When the war was over, he was illegally captured and spent three years in a Russian prison camp. Not enough room here...bottom line: some knew the horrors; some didn't; some tried to stop things but couldn't; some were complicit. My parents came to the US for the ideal of Democracy and spent their lives participating vigilantly in the process; and warning us of the deep responsibility to do likewise. How did Germany succumb to Hitler? Please...our current political landscape is Exhibit A...
7
In 1982, while traveling by train in Sweden, I was verbally accosted by a young Swede.
We are standing in a small group outside our cabins chatting, and he noticed I was an American.
He began to berate me because of Ronald Reagan, whom I loathed and still loath (I voted for Carter and Mondale).
So I said to the man, "My father volunteered for military service and risked his life to fight fascism (which was true; my father was wounded during combat and saw hundreds of his fellow Americans killed in battle).
"What did YOUR father do?", I ask him. "I know that 'neutral' Sweden was a major supplier of war materials to Hitler."
The man literally vanished into thin air.
Now, Swedes are also returning to their Nazi sympathizer past, a very sad day indeed.
4
People all over the planet are sensing the dire situation we find ourselves in -- population of earth still increasing fast, environmental destruction and climate catastrophies, a planet awash in weapons and angry young men, mechanization and AI leaving masses unemployed, massive media manipulation, political chicanery, etc.
In situations like this there is a primitive urge to retreat into tribal units for protection. It's happening all over the world, and will not fix the real problems underlying the fears. Also, WHO and UNESCO report than one in ten humans is now a refugee from war, etc., and they're no longer invisible or "over there".
1
Acknowledging guilt for what you have done, or what was done previously by your people, or in your name, frees up space in your soul. Light enters and you behave in a way that produces better results, as if guided by your better angel. We can all get to this. Every person and group that undertakes to accept and atone for guilt will benefit. Cultures from all over the world have understood this, each in its own way. I hope the Germans do not exclude themselves from this natural process, for their own sake. Professor Stanley does his country of origin a true service with his careful accounting of his family's past there, and his life experience in the country. His view of the danger present in recent trends there, heed it. In this time of small men with small minds, contributions like his are all the more valuable and must be respected.
2
When reading this article, it would not be surprising to think that only in Germany are the Alt-right populists gaining strength. That is not true. They have become a force in every country in Europe, and they are ruling in the United States of America. The author would also lead you to believe that anti-semitism in the more distant past was only horrific in Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire, and not anywhere else. But anyone with any historical knowledge knows that Jews were treated savagely continent-wide. Germans are not uniquely evil, brutal or anti-Semitic.
However, there is such a thing as a uniquely strong German work ethic, which the author belittles. This work ethic is the reason that Germany has been the economic locomotive of Europe ever since its unification, and why Germany has the best economy in Europe and one of the best in the world.
2
After Donald Trump came down that elevator not so long ago, my mother, a concentration camp survivor, told me she liked him as he was "simple to understand" and "he was talking about 'illegal' immigrants and I was a 'legal' immigrant". She has, since, changed her mind about him, but that initial reaction has still left a shudder in my bones that I am unable to shake. The power of tribalism and nationalism are incredibly difficult to free ourselves from, the lessons of history much too easy to forget, the allure of "simplicity" much too easy to exploit. People need to understand that the lessons of the Holocaust are not about Germans and Jews, they are about us all, about every living soul on this planet.
11
This column lost me when it likened our “horrendous past” to Germany’s.
Sorry, professor. If it’s slavery to which you’re referring, we fought a war to end slavery, an institution bequeathed to us by Great Britain. We are the only nation in the world to have shed blood (of tens of thousands, no less) to free slaves.
If that isn’t worth something on the moral scale, well, I give up.
3
I lived in Germany from 1971 to 1990, had my children there, sent them to school and remember that period in the 80's when the "reckoning" was a major topic. Whatever else, it was strongly evident that the rhetoric and discussion was clinical, lacking any personal involvement with the victims of the Nazi period. There were discussions of tactics, events, etc., but very rarely, if ever, an acknowledgement of feeling what it must have been like for, say, mothers, taken to the camps with their children and what their horror must have been like. The discussion was kept sterile. Haven't been back much since 1990, but still have that creepy feeling that all is not well.
33
Germany has a 12-year history of racist genocide and produced an explosion of leading figures in literature, philosophy, mathematics, MUSIC, poetry, and science the likes of which the world has never seen.
America has a 200+-year history of racist genocide (and counting), never produced anything CLOSE to a Bach or a Nietzsche and never will and currently menaces all life on earth with nuclear weapons and rejection of climate change.
How come you don't ever talk about that?
5
The US, after WWII, more or less permanently occupied Germany, and justified it on the basis of countering the Soviet Union, which is true. Another unstated reason was that if the Germans started getting ideas about, say, invading France again, those tanks could be turned around and used to persuade them to reconsider. You will note that the tanks are still there.
4
While I agree with Mr. Stanley on many points, there are some more to consider: note that the recent riots took place in the Eastern part of Germany, which was under communist rule for decades. The process of facing the nation's nazi history happened in Western Germany only. Also, we have to acknowledge that nazi crimes are an important part of school curricula and mostly well presented in school books in Germany. This is almost unique. In most countries you will find much more of a heroic and patriotic narrative in history school books. Finally, my German colleagues are very conscious about their history, much more so than French, Italian, Greek or US colleagues, who all tend to think that they represent an exceptionally great nation. Therefore, I think the Germans are a model in this, but they are not perfect nor homogenous, and recent developments are worrisome indeed.
25
From 1960 to 1990 I often traveled and worked in West Germany. While I felt uneasy with people my age or older (I was born in 1926), I felt comfortable with the younger people, who represented a new generation. East Germany was a different question. It seems to me that many who grew up under a communist regime find it easy to adjust to a fascist frame of mind.
14
Prof. Stanley says this is partly an epistemological issue but glides right over the biggest epistemological problem: what is "Germany"? He seems to blur the distinction between "Germany is responsible..." and "Germans are responsible..." Americans wrestle with this when speaking about slavery or the eradication of Native Americans; the nation must, I think, acknowledge this dark past, but I would think it odd for individual Americans to be required to personally feel guilt about either. For Stanley of course, this is all personal, which is why he continuously references his family's experiences but I am not sure how I should feel if I found out that my great uncle was a concentration camp guard or a member of the SS. I am not responsible for this imaginary uncle's behavior, but I am responsible to ensure that it is not repeated.
29
Very interesting column. Yes, I think it's true that the reckoning is never really over. In the US the reckoning over the Government's treatment of native Americans started long after the major wars and displacements, which maybe makes it easier for the public as a whole to accept our country's (and ancestors') blame. When the events are in the recent past of parents and grandparents, the reckoning and blame is incredibly personal, and clouded by remembrances both real and imagined.
2
I read this article with interest due to the fact I lived and studied in Germany for 8 years before moving to Canada in 1994. I was born in Asia and I have observed with great interest the subtle but significant changes in parameters within which the German politics operates and the how the atmosphere in Germany towards migrants and foreigners is changing.
When I was in germany, I never heard the word "racist" or "racism" being used in daily conversations or in newspaper for that matter. Anyone non-german was "Auslaender" or foreigner. Obviously, this tag was reserved for non-whites such as turks, asians, arabs, etc. In all my day-to-day mundane interactions with Germans, a suppressed emotion of resentfulness towards "others" was always palpable. It was a running gag among "foreigners" that the second question asked by Germans to foreigners following "Where are you from" was "When are you returning to your country?"
Now you can read and hear the word "racism", "white power" daily in publications and from peoples mouth. The palpable resentfulness that we "foreigners" experienced is now out in the open.
I do not believe for a second that Germans have ever reconciled with their past and that the reckoning ever took place. The loss of the second world war has been festering in Germany and the fact that in spite of killing millions of jews, Jews are still a very successful community and have a homeland.
26
@D.L I agree with you 100%
@D.L
But foreigners in China are also now experiencing taunts and curses by the Chinese telling them to go back to where they came from.
1
@D.L Just so you know, I (an extremely 'white' guy), had exactly the same responses from the small-town Germans where I lived. Germany (and nowhere in Europe!) is definitely not the semi-successful melting pot that makes North America so unusual, and wonderful in my opinion. But I doubt that you experienced this because you were non-white, just because you were non-local. (Even within Germany, people tend to still live near where they grew up, with many finding it inconceivable they would raise a family 300 miles away from their parents and extended family.)
1
Historical justice would call for recarving Mt Rushmore into a monument of Black/Indian injustice. Now that's a vote-getter. The psyche is subject to a threshold of suffering. During the Plague of Athens people went from extreme shock to hedonist partying during the worst carnage. Remorse is like mourning--too much of it is debilitating and suicidal. Then there is modern apartheid Israel, rapidly becoming a world pariah with calls for war crime tribunals. Imposed remorse breeds resentment which soon morphs into revenge. Such is human nature. History will repeat itself whether we remember it or not. Forgetfulness if it can be paired with forgiveness is the greatest of all remedies. Germans have been taught to obliterate their history, which means they are navigating in a vacuum. For half a century it could be discussed only underground. This is dangerous. That underground has now burst into the open.
2
Seems to me, for a war to truly be over, both sides must forget, at least after one or two generations. This is not accomplished readily with nearly 250 monuments and museums dedicated to the Holocaust spread across 35 countries. Yes, I know the best intention is to insure those atrocities never happen again, but there's an opposite end to the stick: They are not conducive to forgiveness and "forgetness". If I were modern German I would be particularly vexed if I thought I was having my nose rubbed in crimes that were commited decades before I was even born.
Secondly, I wish the author would have described simply what would satisfy as Germany's "full reckoning" of the Holocaust. As it is, it seems to me nebulous and unattainable, and I hope it is not purposely that way.
(PS. Give the word "narrative" some rest please.)
15
@gaaah
My wife and I have taken many a meal with young Berliners, and they are resolute in their acknowledgement that Germans and Germany are responsible for industrializing death against noncombatants. They have no problem with the many monuments. In fact, they view the stones and sculptures as a welcome public release of internalized tension.
But our poll is limited to Berlin, and it is small.
The view that having one's "nose rubbed in crimes" committed decades before one was born surely exists. You yourself possess it.
In an effort to avoid the trap of false equivalency, I'm obliged to ask your view of "crimes," the relative weights given to them by societies in terms of punishment and atonement. For instance, should the attempted eradication of an entire people by bullets, gassing and starvation be treated the same as, say, the theft of property?
The disagreement concerning the expiration date for memorializing German WW II transgressions goes on. For the reason of not getting your nose rubbed in old crimes, and given the weight you place on the crimes, you deem it proper to put the expiration date in an old calendar. Others hold that the crimes were of such scale that the expiration date ought to remain in a calendar far in the future. Und so geht es.
1
With the war still a month away from ending, General Eisenhower foresaw that the crimes of the Holocaust were so horrendous, that they would one day be denied. Ike ordered film records be made, one film, "Death Mills", is on YouTube, and shows Eisenhower touring a camp. This is from a letter Eisenhower sent after his tour of a concentration camp at Ohrdruf:
SECRET
DDE/nmr
15 April 1945
Dear General:
.....On a recent tour of the forward areas in First and Third Armies ....the most interesting - although horrible - sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description.....The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda.".....
(the original document is available at the Eisenhower Presidential archives)
18
Well thought and written piece. However, my view is that the author is mixing two separate while somewhat liked issues: Germany’s Nazi past and massive immigration in the recent years.
The rise of AfD in the general population is most likely a function of the massive immigration and unease with the « other » rather tha a sense of unfair historical treatement of the German people. Without a million immigrants in 2015, the AfD would be nowhere near as popular as it is.
6
I didn't have time to read the full article as I need to go to work. I will later.
But my question is: what would a full reckoning by Germany of its past look like to you?
10
"With whom am I to speak about forgiveness? I, who don't believe in collective guilt. Who am I, to believe in collective innocence?" Elie Wiesel
14
If the United States continues to dumb down its education institutions, if we have unstable and mentally unfit leaders like Donald Trump, if we continue to tolerate a useless congress, and if we cater to the rich, and ignore racial inequality, this country could very easily end up like Germany prior to WWII. All the signs are now here, we need to take heed of that before it’s too late.
28
How do you expunge human nature? I spent six weeks in Austria in 1984, in Innsbruck, a very Nazi city during the Nazizeit. On the surface it was all modern and reformed, but I did see quite a few masonic symbols scattered about. I wondered if Austrians knew what they meant, but if you do a search for "Masonic Music" the first entry is Mozart. Freemasons were of course victims of Hitler's extermination efforts too.
But anyway, it was evident that there was still a strong undercurrent of antisemitism in the minds of Austrians back then, but there were still many living survivors from the Nazizeit too. Only 40 years had passed. One economics professor from the University of Innsbruck said quite openly that there was still a great deal of antisemitism in Austrian society. The Austrians still focused on the size of a person's nose, a large nose indicating Jewish heritage, their reflexes told them. I thought it curious that their president Kurt Waldheim had a big nose and he was linked to military service for the Nazi's during the war. It seemed like a subtle propaganda campaign to change Austrian's thinking about people with big noses. But there was also a strong bias against the handicapped. I heard stories of open discrimination and hostility toward those who needed a wheelchair.
I have no more Wortraum to continue about American's attitudes on the slave classes. Russians didn't participate in the slave trade. The inherent bias isn't there, but they had pogroms.
Denazification is not merely a German problem.
By 1947 Cold War was in place. West Germany had to be put back together quickly. Much was done to shut down discussion in the US of A of German malefactions. Denazification of the West German population went into overdrive, which was very convenient. Suddenly in Germany it seemed as if no one had been a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. In one sense there just weren't enough anti-Nazis around for all the work involved. A book like "Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945-1953" by David Monod will give one an idea of the difficulties and the shilly-shallying.
Back in the fifties there was very little talk in the US of A about the actual process of killing Jews, Roma, homosexuals, communists and the handicapped, until the kidnapping and trial of Eichmann in the early sixties, when the world had an opportunity to visualize the atrocities. (Even now the Poles have passed a law making it a crime to say that Polish nationals collaborated in the massacres, this with the acquiescence of the Israeli government.)
5
@Tannhauser I was with you until your very last offensive lie: show me ANYWHERE that the Israeli government acquiesced in what you completely misstate as the Polish position which truly stated is contemptible enough: that the death camps should not be called "Polish death camps"; nowhere is there an attempt to criminalize what you state and Israel has never acquiesced in it, quite the opposite in fact.
1
@skeptic
Also in the New York Times.
Yad Vashem Rebukes Israeli and Polish Governments Over Holocaust Law
Israel and Poland tried to put a dispute over a Holocaust law behind them with a joint statement. But Israel’s Holocaust memorial center found “grave errors and deceptions” in the statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/world/middleeast/israel-poland-holoca...
You can google it, Mr. Skeptic!
1
The sense of being special, most heroic, and most mistreated is at the basis of fascist revival, the combination of ego amok and blindness to truth makes it a kind of illness, a contagious kind. You hear its echoes in the article here. It appeals to that in individuals which would grant superiority without effort and primacy without merit--just by identity, unity and force. So violence is its métier, bullying is its hallmark, and hatred is its sine qua non, that without it cannot exist. That unity of hatred, the attendant necessity of wars--domestic and foreign--is its glue and glory. The triumph of the leader's will is the glorification of the individual units that give that will power. The narcissistic leader sheds his special glow upon the enabling followers. This is a romantic movement, not dependent on rational thought but on emotion, so there's little to be gained in attempting to reason with it, I am sorry to say. It only yields to opposition, in Germany or elsewhere, and Germany is certainly not alone in falling victim to the sickness--it wasn't alone in the last century, either, though its excessive violence did result in opposition that overcame it then. May we be so fortunate, so determined, so effortful again, should the need arise. As it may.
5
Germany's Nazi past is still present?
Why should that surprise anyone? In the modern world nationalism has been played down somewhat, managed to be overcome, and religion likewise, but race and ethnicity have proven to be more difficult, and there still seems no real ideal type society to shoot for beyond nationalism, religion, race, ethnicity, various cultures.
True, people posit conceptions such as socialism being beyond the previously stated types of group behavior, but socialism so far seems to have upraised marginalized groups organized along traditional lines (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.) more than anything else (the multicultural ideal), and when socialism has been more ideal it usually means a vast crowd both robbed of traditional identity along racial, ethnic, religious, national, etc. lines and without formation of individual identities (celebration of, freedom of the individual to develop his or her life as he or she wishes), and overseen by a group of elites who ensure "fairness" in a type of Christian/secular political/economic organization.
Ask any person to imagine him or herself without identifying along racial or ethnic or religious or national or cultural, etc. lines. We dislike a person identifying purely by race or ethnicity (pure blood) or purely by religion or nation, etc. but what is a person purely beyond these categories? Perhaps we can get some writers/thinkers/philosophers to draw up that description. Hold that stone close to chest.
1
While Germany has made far more progress in confronting and acknowledging the horrors its past since 1945 than the US has made since 1865, neither country has outlasted a desire on the part of some of its citizens to return to a storied and gloried past, even if that nostalgic fantasy is for a flawed vision which never really existed in the first place. Germany is at least free of monuments to the Nazis while we are only now beginning to openly discuss and deal with the hostility embodied in Confederate monuments. We really need to lose the Lost Cause.
8
Fascism comes to power because it starts out by being correct about social issues which moderate parties ignore. Being uniquely correct about the most important concerns of the population obscures the craziness of the rest of its program.
Germans have a good case for being victimized. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, which determined the conventional tale of World War I, the defeated Germans suffered unprecedentedly devastating impositions of a Victors' Peace.
This was mainly the work of Clemenceau and the vengeful French, aided by the British, and the cowardice of Wilson. Single-handedly, they set the stage for WWII, far more than Hitler ever did.
Germany, alone among the three gung-ho nations who destroyed Europe during 1914-1918, was ruled to have unique responsibility for the war.
Insanely and impossibly, it was ordered to pay for it.
What does one call such intentional destruction of a nation other than "victimization"?
This cold blooded imposition on Germany of social disaster and upheaval bred the poverty, desperation, and resentment that finally exploded in the coming to power of the Nazis.
The British economic advisor, John Maynard Keynes, foreseeing disaster, walked out of the conference: his parting words were that the action meant another world war.
Five or so German generations have been born since Versailles. They ask to get off the hook. Shouldn't we concur? Or, are we going to hold them to the entire Biblical seven generations?
6
I do not think the author's description and reasoning matches the reality of today's politics in Germany. Every single Country in europe and, arguably, the west is shifting to the right. Most of these countries a lot more than Germany. So we observe a global trend, and when Germany falls in line, it's because it "has not yet overcome it's nazi past"?
One could argue, that, because we have worked so hard on remembering our crimes, the falllout in Germany has yet been LESS extreme. We do not have a populist Party in a governing position and a big majority of Germans still despises the AFDs politics. Which does not mean that the AFD is not problematic - it is - but to blame the current success of our far-right on us "not overcoming our nazi past" seems a bit unfair to Germany.
Our Nazi past is present. Yes. Because we refuse to bury it. Because we want to see it. As a reminder of what humans are capable when left unchecked. But it's not what explains the AFD's rise to power.
22
How quickly and easily you conflate conservative or "right wing" support with fascism and nazism. Is it possible that Europeans are just tired of the excesses and failures of multi-culturalism and political correctness which have dominated European politics for 40 years?
How long should the payments to your father have continued? Should you and your children continue to be compensated 80 years after the fact?
At some point, the past is the past. We should not forget it, but neither should we obsess about it, no matter how tragic.
11
Fascism was just the 20th century form of Empire.
The newer, perfected, and improved model in the 21st century is just this multiparty Vichy disguised global capitalist Empire —- which no longer needs a tactically camouflaged name today, since after 1991, people think there is no such thing as an Empire.
3
The article does no more than reiterate Goldhagen's thesis of perpetual collective guilt, with a heavy handed dollop of victimized "me-tooism."
The pretext for article is the current migration debate in Germany and the lead-in about "thousands of Neo Nazis... chasing down immigrants." That is an inaccurate statement. Thousands protested for several days, quite peacefully and without incident. The huge majority of the protestors were ordinary and older Germans, none of whom were carrying the usual flags or insignia of neo Nazis. Two short videos showed *some* people chasing others. The equivalent of the state's FBI chief has called the accuracy of the videos into question.
There is a debate throughout all of Europe on the question of mass migration. The Swedish Democrats made significant gains (18%) in yesterday's election. But apart from the inaccurate lead-in, the article does not discuss what has become, not simply a German, but a pan-European issue.
The article avoids any analysis or even an opinion on whether or why Europe is witnessing a rise of pan-European fascism. To do so would entail recognizing that the "world war" in Europe was in many respects a civil war.
One can make an argument that Europe's migration debate represents a resurgence of European nazi/fascism. But the article fails to do that. Instead of dealing with the complexity of *that* issue, the article falls back to the usual, and frankly tiresome, drubbing of Germany.
15
@ChipII guess for those of us who are part of the category of people for whom the legacy of that murder and destruction, will never leave our consciousness, your categorizing it as the "tiresome, drubbing of Germany" says it all. Shame on you.
2
There is nothing special to the German nation or the more vague idea of German culture. No nation is exceptional and no culture is superior. Post war West Germany has confronted its crimes against humanity and its genocide like no nation before. Still people growing up in the German culture are not immune against the horrific impulses of the Homo sapiens: intolerance, hate, brutality, discrimination, racism, mass murder.
The Holocaust was not a singularity of human history, rather genocide seems to be the dark underbelly of civilization. No matter where people are brutally slaughtered around the world now, in the past or in the future, it’s our collective responsibility to face it, and to restore justice and peace. As a species organized in civilization we need to cure mass murderous behavior at its complex roots and lower the likelihood that it will happen again somewhere in our world.
Describing genocide as as specific national or cultural problem misses the point and might give false comfort and sometimes might dangerously nurture the feeling of superiority.
Crimes against humanity are a human disease and we are collectively guilty for where ever they are committed.
61
@Oliver Herfort--sorry. Auschwitz was special. Germany created crematoria and gas chambers.
Whilst stationed in Germany, originally at a former S.S. station, I attended my father's synagogue's rededication. The black-clad fireman's wind-blown torch flame briefly licked its exterior wall, eliciting a shiver. Never again? All it would take is an economic down-turn for them to march.
5
the manipulation of myth and racial attitudes still prevalent among germans was made extremely clear during the recent economic meltdown in greece. one heard and read things like 'lazy southerners' and 'bouzouki playing greeks who dance and drink all night' were the more crude expressions of a deep seated belief that mediterranean people are innately lazy and devious.
visit any land or people formerly occupied by the germans and you will find a certainty among many that the world has not seen the last of the german conquerors...
2
"But the ease of overcoming a difficult past is itself a pernicious myth. The struggle to maintain a liberal democratic culture while living with fearsome ghosts is, in fact, never-ending." Beyond Nazi Germany, this statement appears quite relevant to the US in the context of its hundreds of years of racism, both against Native Americans and African Americans. Clearly, there is a never-ending struggle in progress despite the occasional declarations that the struggle is over.
3
As a black person who has heard this argument, and believed it, that if only Americans were as good as the Germans in facing up to their history of racism and oppression, I found this article very enlightening. Thank you. I'm reminded also that before the Nazi Holocaust there was the attempted (and successful, I think) genocide of the indigenous people of Southwestern Africa. Germany has not fully owned up to that either.
28
@kim You are correct about the killings in Southwest Africa. Between 1904 and 1908 in the land that is now Namibia 100,000 Herero and 10 thousand Namaqua people were killed by the German military. After defeating these tribes in battle many of these people, men, women and their children,were simple driven into a desert without oasis to die. Others were exposed to a technique developed by the British in the Boar War that had concluded just years earlier. The British had decided to concentrate the Boar population in camps, thus we have the term 'Concentration Camp'. This technique was also used in the Herero and Namaqua genocide. A reason for this lack of coverage, besides the obvious racism it shows, is that it makes the Third Reich appear to be an aberration, it was not.
4
The Germans fomented WWII because they felt victimized after losing WWI. As a result they victimized Jews (exterminationist Antisemitism). They felt victimized by the Allies' pressure to apologize for Germany's subhuman actions (the death camps, etc.). Now they feel victimized by Muslim immigrants. The German mentality, with some exception of course, is sorely lacking in empathy or in true humanity.
My mother, a concentration and slave labor camp survivor, would often say, "How could a people with so much culture behave in such an atrocious manner?" I've been derided for saying that the Germans, with some exceptions, never did change, but they haven't. That now is obvious.
6
When I was in the sixth grade, my body, including my brain, was permanently damaged when I was subjected to what I label "institutional" abuse perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church with the cooperation of some of the laity. Was it EVERY Catholic? Absolutely not. I know many Catholics who are both appalled and surprised at the current revelations of abuse and here in the USA, no one is even considering how girls, some of them victims of sexual predation, were treated. I subscribe to a Catholic newspaper which recently published an editorial in response to Catholic readers who wanted to read and hear less about the sex abuse scandal. The Holocaust perpetrated by Germany is not old news and, a study of religion in the Holy Roman Empire reveals that Jews were required to wear Star of David patches prior to and around the time of the Reformation in order to prevent interreligious dating. Much evil is perpetrated by accepting oppressive and stigmatizing cultural norms. We should label behaviors and try to understand each other. And, never forget and keep on talking.
3
I do not know what the autor thinks is a realistic concept for dealing with the past? I am German, born in 1963, married to an American. Reckoning with the past meant talking with my father who was barely 17 at the end of the war and who - by sheer luck - came out of the war without having fired a single shot. He deeply has understood the horrors of the Nazi regime. This is living memory - and such conversations have taken place in a lot of German families. This is more important than what monuments can achieve. No, Germans are not any better their neighbors today. They are succumbing to the same nationalistic disease. But this is a question of the future not of dealing with the past. Fighting for humanity and democracy is a daily struggle which never ends. What does the author want? There is hurt and outrage in his words. Understandable. What Germany has tried to do is imperfect. But within the limits of human nature it is what you can realistically expect. Look around: Japan? Russia (Stalin)? China (Mao)? Who has dealt with the atrocities of the 20th century in a way which would correspond to his standards? Setting them up as high as he does only helps the far right which can say: See, they will never be happy, no matter what we do.
122
I've never been to eastern Germany but have traveled a bit in the west. It seems there is a difference in how historical memories are treated. In cities like Koln and Dusseldorf, towns like Solingen, small memorials to victims of the Holocaust are omnipresent on walls and benches. If the author's father had been beaten to unconsciousness in a park in Solingen it would be unsurprising to find a plaque noting that event on bench in that park.
1
Forgive me, but reading this article I get the impression that no amount of German atonement will ever be good enough for the author. He's got a hunger that can never be satisfied, because nothing will ever erase the history. Fair enough--but when he uses the fact that some Germans now are right-wing nationalists to suggest that, deep down, they all are, he goes too far. He commits the same fallacy that right-wing nationalists commit, that of mistaking a part for the whole (as in, if one immigrant kills a girl, that's the way they all do). The fact is Germany, like the US, is divided. Millions of Germans want Germany to be a liberal, cosmopolitan democracy. The author should recognize that, even if their atonement for the past will never satisfy him.
46
When we survived World War II, we asked ourselves how this could have happened in the 20th century. Now we must ask, how can this occur in the 21st century. We are definitely on the road to backward evolution, where the future of the human species will not be informed by reason but by religious (and racist) doctrine. With our advances in science and communication, one would think that we would be increasingly basing our decisions on logic and reason. But for understandable reasons, the opposite is occurring.
In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer, and this will be based on a "survival" algorithm that constantly searches for the highest expected value of a seeded "I exist" statement. Then and only then, will we have irrefutable proof of how we have tricked this survival program about just what exactly is supposed to survive - leading to a program de facto for destruction. At that point, we can begin the long road back to reason and a continued pleasurable life on this planet.
See RevolutionOfReason.come 21st century.
1
The past is never dead. It's not even past. William Faulkner
As an American living for almost 29 years in this country what happened during the Holocaust will never ever be past. This is true for Germany as well. We will be dealing with the Holocaust and its horrors for decades to come. As we should be.There's not a day that passes here that we're not confronted with our past history. Daily programs on the radio (the radio/tv is owned by the government) dealing directly with the Holocaust and educating new generations about its horrors.
Austria is a tiny country compared to Germany and we're not having these problems even though our government has moved Right--not yet. In 2015 over 95,000 musliims entered the country. We have over 850,000+.
The German writer Hans Fallada wrote a book about Otto and Elise Hampel, a couple in Berlin who began writing postcards against Hitler and the war in acts of civil disobedience and leaving them around town. They were executed when found out. Tortured before. Although I've read many accounts about the Holocaust and German people who resisted like the Hampels, nothing before ever came close to the atmosphere of complete terror during that time living in Berlin.
Your family lived through these times of horror. You wrote that you visit the country often. You carry scars when you travel there because your personal history is alive within you. Visiting isn't the same as living there--even a year. You are a stranger in a strange land.
5
Thank you for telling your story. You have eloquently put into words that which is almost indescribable. I hope you find some peace in the telling. My eyes are filed with tears of sadness for you and anger towards all the perpetrators of hate.
1
As to Germans commenting that 'the U.S. hasn't faced up to its past' with respect to slavery, treatment of Native Americans, and Vietnam: we have in spades, and probably overly so.
Our mistreatment of people and cultures was deeply ingrained in my childhood upbringing. We have an entire literary and cinematic culture that still embraces and explores these issues, even today.
While travelling in Switzerland with two German business associates (one the grandson of a Nazi naval general), they let slip that they thought WWII was the result of Germany 'having to' pay war reparations. I jumped in and said that that was certainly not true. The flip side of paying for the carnage of war cannot justify the elevation of a Hitler.
Germany had best not forget that.
4
Thank you for this piece. It reminds us all of how difficult it is to stand up to hate, and how difficult it is to admit to after the terror has subsided.
1
In one of Jared Diamond's or Steven Pinker's books (I forget which) is a list over 500 genocides around the world JUST SINCE THE YEAR 1500; e.g. mass slaughter of Haitians by Dominicans, of Tasmanians by Australians, of American Indians, etc (not always solely ethnic - e.g. Stalin's mass murder of Kulaks). Humans are hairless apes whoe have developed dentistry, dancing, differential equations and due diligence. But the evolutionary baggage is never far behind. We will always be just hairless apes. And, no, religion hasn't made a dent; if anything it's made us more murderous (although Gothic Cathedrals and Bach Oratorios are indeed wonderful).
4
@Unconvinced
But surely the appropriate inference - not the correct or right or moral one - can't be: that's just the way it is; all that can be done is to work with or around it; do the best you can; stuff happens; move on with your life - if yours is not one currently being snuffed out or next in line. And if yours becomes current just acquiesce listening to Bachin the rationalization that you fought the good fight? Is either Diamond or Pinker or anybody explicitly or implicitly more hopeful? Gotta be; yes, imo. Or inability to handle the truth.
@Jethro Pen Pinker seems to be very optimistic (his latest book 'Enlightenment Now'). No need to acquiesce ... but courage is putting one foot in front of the other (i.e. trying to do the right thing as we go) but knowing that in the end we're all dead.
Unfortunately, this essay demonstrates the same kind of ethnic prejudice that underlies the extreme-right movements in both the United States and in Germany. It accuses an entire group of people of crimes committed before most of them were born.
It's odd to find a professor of philosophy making such a fallacious argument.
16
@Anny
Thank you for this comment, I fully agree. Sadly, this is not an exception. It seems to me that in the US media in general and the New York Times in particular, any intellectual, moral, and journalistic standards are abandoned when the subject is Germany. Other examples of this are opinion pieces in which Roger Cohen links the Euro crisis and the VW diesel scandal to percieved defects of the German national character. Even more blatant anti-German hate speech can be found in Alan Dershowitz' article "J'acuse", wrong spelling copied, in the Huffington post.
I'm all for hearing different voices and different perspectives, and I welcome fact-based criticism of German policies. But his sort of intellectually lazy, sterotyping, and obviously hate-driven nonsense does not merit publication in a self-respecting newspaper.
Without a caption, it is possible to assume that the photograph next to the title shows something innocuous; people waiting to get into a soccer game perhaps. Except that they are real people now considering the diabolical aligned with the final solution. Then you notice the smirks. Then you know.
This type of hate is - too often - explained away in effete terms; apologists want to hold hands and change hearts. Never mind those on the right (who are privately chuckling), one too many on the left wants to empathize with these people, and understand their pain, and eventually justify what they are doing and blame the victims.
Your article triggers thinking about all involved, and lead to a clear inference: the compliant and cheering right, the disinterested center, and the cloying left are all ineffective and dangerous. Way too many tragedies of gargantuan proportion occur because we assume humans are basically good and rational; we ignore the overwhelming presence of very banal evil. I.e., this will happen here, if it is not happening already.
I am wondering whether these fine people in the photograph, who are now publicly espousing their fear, hate, loathing, and will perpetrate just about anything - would still be able, if all received a subpoena tomorrow, and had to fork over their life savings, lost their jobs, and served a stiff sentence? The left will say: "why provoke, it will make it worse." And therein lies the problem. Thanks for your article.
1
As a German I feel ashamed about this new outbreak of violence. Unfortunately it again shows a typical human behaviour which is settled in each genome of mammals. "Follow the leader". When there is a strong voice people listen and probably follow the arguments. Unfortunately the brain is often so tricked that rational thinking is surpressed. this is a phenomenom I observe everywhere. People need a "guiding light", a hoard leader. And so they follow the calls blindly.
For us Germans it is still not understandable how the american people fell for Donald Trump who we saw as a bragging big mouth. As long he was "just" a businessman we didn't care. But as we learned: Never underestimate the "call to the arms". And this is how populistic parties grow everywhere, in Europe, in the US. Everywhere. The problem is. You can't hardly get rid of them. And while the justice is powerless the influence of these people grow.
The party AFD was founded in the eastern part of Germany where the promised "Aufschwung" (Rise) of the economy didn't work as promised after the wall was torn down. Unemployment is high, investments in infrasctructure didn't take place and people are angry at the government which leads to protests, rise in memberships to the AFD, hate against immigrants.
It is annoying to see how common sense politics are blocked by AFD and instead chaotic outbreaks of violence destroy every chance of living peacefully together.
7
@Robert Madsen
I think that the phenomenon of Donald Trump has only shown us how un-exceptional the German character is. I never thought such a large part of our multi-ethnic open society would fall for the lies and dog-whistles of this con-man, but they did. We are no better than the Germans of the 1930s.
2
Germany has paid untold billions in restitution. Where is the end for the present population to pay for the sins of the guilty
generation which for the most part is no longer alive ?
2
Look at how America reacted to and later justified, and still justifies, My Lai. None of the perpetrators were actually named as war criminals. Lt. Calley was pardoned by the president in response to overwhelming opinion by the American public that he be released. All of the other identified perpetrators received minor punishments, if any. The prevailing story in American's minds is still a false one that says Lt. Calley led a band of rogue troops who lost control, but there is little mention that a similar operation took place just a few miles away by another company with the very same goals and results. They too massacred all of the civilian residents of the village.
4
Germany has done a WHOLE lot more to atone and correct for the past than the United States has. The United States is in large measure still the profoundly racist nation it was when it had a large slavery industry and is still the racist nation it was under Jim Crow. A slim majority of Americans repudiate those, and hardly any but the hard left even acknowledge that the nation was built on genocide of Native Americans.
Looking at those quotes from AfD, that hostility and violence to immigrants, claims that Americans, I mean Germans are taught a false past, that hostility to liberal democracy, that pride in soldiers fighting for a great evil, Americans see very very familiar themes.
In contrast to the United States, large majorities of Germans understand what fascism is viscerally and repudiate it entirely. The difference between the United States and Germany is that AfD looks to become the second largest party.
In the United States that party controls the Presidency, Congress, the Courts, and nearly enough state houses to rewrite the constitution.
6
Mentioned nowhere in this opinion is the real cause of the resurgence of the right in Germany - the mass influx of immigrants who share neither the language nor the culture and who stand little chance of ever being assimilated.
7
Last year, the far-right AfD politician Björn Höcke made the national news in Germany when he called for a new ‘culture of memory’ in Germany, asking: What kind of country puts a monument to its own shame in the middle of its capital city? Anyone who’s been the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin understands its great power, as well as the resolve of the people who put it there to remember. Only a fool would say that any country has ‘fully reckoned’ with its past, but I have the deepest respect for the hundreds of Germans I’ve known who have looked long and hard in the mirror. The answer to Mr. Höcke‘s question - Germany is that kind of country - is why, although clearly flawed, it deserves more credit than the author is willing to give.
7
I see the photo centers on what might be described as an angry young man with menace in his look. But look at the others. Ordinary Germans; young and old, men and women. People fed up with being told diversify is good for them, and the more diverse the better it is. People, like others across Western Europe, asking where was the mandate for mass immigration? Where was the refererendum? The integration minister, herself of Turkish ethnicity, recently said “there is no such thing as specific German culture”. Really? No culture, tradition, heritage and history of famed Germans that are the foundation of any nation State and its people. And those who question, let alone criticize or challenge mass immigration that sees the native population being pushed into a minority in places, particularly in major urban areas, are called racist, uneducated, a bit thick. Keep calling people that and you get the Afd, Sweden Democrats, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini. It is not a victory for the Right so much a catastrophic failure of the Left.
1
What Germans and Americans are learning together is that both countries have a dark side that can not be safely ignored or denied - but too many reject that lesson. It appears to be part of human nature, both the evil and the reluctance to confront it.
Fear, anger, hatred, greed, lust, envy, ambition - you find them everywhere in every time. If they are not harnessed by us for good, they will surely harness us for evil.
I, too, am a Jew with a historical tie to Germany. I lived in Hamburg for years during the 1980’s teaching history to German children. Hamburg was then known as a Nazi stronghold.
The high school kids I taught were the grandchildren of the war generation. They told me that their grandparents didn’t know., not because they were latent Nazis, but because their grandparents had to save face.
The Beatles got their start in Hamburg. At the time, it had one of the best soccer teams in Europe. My kids were into popular culture, sports, and getting into college. World War II was already a distant past. Their ties to Nazism were tenuous at best.
Now we are talking about the grandchildren of the grandchildren. If they are neo-Nazis it is for the same reason there are neo-Nazis in the US —because there is profound hatred among the alienated young. Tying it to great, great grandparents suggests that there is something in the water of the Elbe that cannot ever be remedied. That, of course, is contrary to history.
This essay, I believe, tells you more about the Jewish experience than that of the Nazis. The professor clearly views himself as an outsider in Berlin and he casts a wary eye. I am an assimilationist. I met my kids’ parents, I dated the girls’ PE teacher, I barnstomed with boys’ and girls’ basketball teams and I cheered for HSV against Bayern Munchen. Nazism was essentially dead in the 1980’s. Do not judge a man until you have stepped into his shoes.
63
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq, it destabilized the Middle East to the point that millions of people have been displaced. Many countries, not only Germany, have had to deal with a huge influx of foreigners, which has strained resources and allowed xenophobic tendencies to rise again. European leaders have been reluctant to appear anti-refugee and have not demonstrated that they have control of the issue. Meanwhile, the population of the EU itself, while mostly liberal, has never been completely tolerant and, despite Brussels’ best efforts, has not abandoned nationalism. What we are witnessing now is the reaction by a population who feels, rightly or wrongly, that they have lost control over their country’s future. Prepare for an accelerating right-wing resurgence.
3
Wonderful - thank you for this article, Professor. A mountain man in Vietnam once said to me that "American can never repay their debt to us." So true, and a thought that crosses my mind every single time I think of or am referred to Germany. Germany can never repay their debt.
6
I very much appreciate the article, but I'm left wondering what successful reckoning with one's past as a nation looks like, if the German model is insufficient.
7
@Hans Pedersen, it's individual people who make up a nation, and it's their understanding and commitment to truth that determine such reckoning. Often, that entails reparation also to those whom one's nation has harmed, even when that means taking on some measure of collective payment. Because of that, reckoning with a national past is a matter of a majority and an overall stance of responsibility to human decency and dignity. And because of that, such a reckoning can in time be lost, the commitment can be lost, and the same human failings again take over individual psyches, be sown and grown by demagogues, and the atrocious past be resurrected. So it is not a matter of eradication of the evil, as it is a vigilance against it, that is key. The model is that nations attain decency and lose it, often cyclically, and not just Germans, either.
3
Hans Pedersen--I would think that even tougher control over the vicious right wing, IF any country wants to be a part of that new world order, they fought and died for, in WWII, and after.
1
To most Germans, including myself this is not surprising. Especially not to those of us who lived in the West Sektor when there was still a Wall.
And to understand Germany's internal division, is the only way to understand why many of these recent occurances are happening former East German states like Sachsen, Thüringen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Meck-Pom or Brandenburg; where many factories once offering lifetime employment shuttered, and the new free market economy had little to offer.
From the economic frustration and humiliation grew anger, and from years of social isolation came a xenophobia that lashed out at anything foreign.
This is not to say the rise of right wing neo-facism is characteristic of former East Germany alone. Recent Bundestag elections have proven that nationalist parties like the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) also have a strong hold in places like Nordrhein-Westfalen and Schleswig-Holstein.
But there's no way of denying that the turning point came in 2015, when Angela Merkel extended the humanitarian invitation to war-torn Syrians, and the rest of the world came to Germany as well.
With resources stretched to the limit, housing scarce, and the prospect of socially integrating hundreds of thousands to a foreign language and culture, it's not surprising that resentments would arise -- along with the specter of our Nzai past.
Sadly, Germany is not alone as intolerance and nativism has once again sprouted everywhere. Even here in the U.S.
Time to beware.
35
N. Smith--There is no question that the West failed to manage the dissolution of the Soviet Union, failed to look beyond their noses. Kind of like when most Americans vote, then walk away expecting everything to just work out, without their supervision.
@ChesBay
Oddly enough, it almost sounds as though you're describing the same thing we did with Iraq -- simply walking away after toppling their dictatorship and leaving them to fend for themelves.
Hopefully our next election will be a Referendum as well as call to arms.
while Germany's past has unusually horrendous aspects, it is normal for country to try to emphasize its positives and downplay their past excesses. Obviously the US does this with regard to slavery, segregation and the near extinction of native Americans (Canada too on that) but so does Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Japan, Russia... whose empires or colonies were built on some extreme cruelty, but all also have very positive attributes in their culture as does the US and Germany. So Germany is just being normal.
I think what is dangerously destabilizing in Germany and some other parts of Europe is the recent massive immigration from people whose religion and culture is so often hostile to what has evolved in Europe. Its a caution to the US.
10
@Barry Schiller
Barry, do you really want to go on the record saying:
"Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Japan, Russia... whose empires or colonies were built on some extreme cruelty, but all also have very positive attributes in their culture as does the US and Germany. So Germany is just being normal."?
When Empires grow from the 20th century 'Nation-state' centric Empires, that Paul Kennedy diagnosed in his epic "The Rise and Fall of the Great States, 1500 to 2000", and metastasize into a unitary Disguised Global Capitalist Empire --- where is the space for any democracy in our world?
With Empire being the polar opposite of democracy, is it any wonder that Page and Gilens ask "Democracy in America?", or Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote "How Democracies Die", and even "The Post" in its 21st century mast-head slogan notes "Democracy Dies in Darkness" (of Empire), that as Americans who founded our country in a "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin du Rivage] --- are starting to say under Emperor Trump that:
"We can't be an Empire".
1
What's so tragic about the uprising of nationalism across the globe is that it's happening in good times. Unlike the early thirties there is less starvation in the world, more employment, more housing and clean water and less overall poverty. There is also real social safety nets in Europe and the USA.
This is as good as it gets economically for the entire world. Things are actually improving and yet racism, nationalism, tribalism and fascism is on the rise. Free speech and press are under assault and chemical weapons and civilian bombings of women and children are a routine part of wars where US and Russians are active participants.
When Roosevelt said we have nothing to fear except fear itself, most people didn't know where their next meal was coming from. Fear today is being manufactured today to create conditions that allowed autocratic leaders to rise in the 30's. The conditions don't exist but fear and loathing apparently still does.
20
Absolute nonsense. Few societies in the world have been as willing as Germany to acknowledge the extent of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime and the Kaiserreich, and to attempt to atone for them. Russia,Japan and China have committed crimes just as egregious. Even the lily white like the US can't escape censure, and even victims like Poland and France are not lily white. Right now we have the spectacle of Israel running the world's largest ghetto.
This entire area is one of moral ambiguities and inherent contradictions from Manstein's famous comment that Prussian field marshals don't mutiny to a case I know of where a 20 year German student was enlisted in the Wehrmacht and sent off to fight for his country in Russia (just like American students were sent to fight for their country in Vietnam), was taken prisoner and died in Russian POW camp.
The fact is that a certain amount of societal amnesia is necessary to the preservation of civic peace (witness the current statue controversy) and this is as true of the US as of Germany which in many ways has set an example in coming to terms with its past that others could usefully emulate.
30
Mr. Stanley's essay makes a few good points but is unfortunately erratic. In particular I was struck at his personal upset at the memorializing of 100 ordinary people who died trying to cross the authoritarian Berlin Wall. This struck me as very strange.
I'm a North America living in Germany for almost 7 years now. The day-to-day reality is that most Germans are good, upstanding people and society runs very well. This is probably also why Mr. Stanley's grandmother missed it. The scars of the first half of the 20th century are woven into society's fabric and every older German carries guilt. Unfortunately these people are dying and institutional memory is more abstract. Each German schoolchild visits a concentration camp and learn this history but it's a hard "lesson" to pass down. Either they don't have German lineage or as (great-) grandchildren of the WWII generation simply cannot "get it" in the same way as those who experienced it or grew up in a divided country. Even raising the flag was considered a shameful thing until the 2004 World Cup. The current extremists are only using the excuse that Germany is tired of being ashamed of its past to justify itself but I think there's some truth to the fact that Germans do want to acknowledge the tremendous good here too.
Case in point, just this past week, a demonstration of 187 far-right protesters in Hamburg drew a counter-demonstration of 10,000 Germans against extremism. Much of the country was very proud.
102
@C Reynolds
If you mean word cup football/soccer - 2004 was not a year when the world cup was held. it was 2002 and 2006.
"America's Racist Past is Still Present"
"Point a finger at someone and three point back at you"
Jason Stanley is correct, but should look introspectively at the USA before he dumps on another country.
Canada as an example, still is prejudiced against our indigenous peoples,while preaching against a host of countries about their moral values.
31
I think the author is correct; there will always be a struggle. We should also have a long, hard talk with ourselves (as Americans) about the terrible plight of the Palestinians.
39
Selective morality is no morality at all.
Are you also protesting the Russian occupation of Ukraine and butchery in Chechnya, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Turkish oppression of the Kurds, the appalling treatment of muslims in Myanmar? Examples of brutality and occupation abound, and most of them have less justification than the Israeli occupation of Palestine in response to Arab aggression.
1
@Jonathan
Why particularly the Palestinians? Why not the Rohingya or the Uighurs or anybody?
1
The real issue behind of these kinds of sheer craziness is the many stresses, economic and cultural caused by globalization. It's been centuries since there has been such large movements of people from one culture zone to another, and this time it is aggravated by modern media and the elevation of many third-rate minds to leadership of a sort. Alex Jones, with his tireless nonsense, is just one example of the way the larger social fabric frays.
Improved technology has lowered the bar so that anyone can post well-crafted propaganda on YouTube. Thugs are becoming acceptable as a normal personality type, while scholars are mocked.
8
Mr. Stanley is absolutely correct.
His essay should be printed in all German newspapers.
There are many Germans who would welcome his voice and, sadly, more who would not.
This struggle for the truth never ends.
15
I am more than sympathetic with the atrocities described by the author. I understand the horror to the extent that is possible.
But there is something fundamentally wrong with the way activists try to reckon with those evils these days.
The fundamental problem is that a matter much deeper than mental understanding is involved. You can't educate someone to deny their selfish nature no matter how much you try. Crowds may nod soberly in a lecture hall or agree enthusiastically at political rallies. But that means almost nothing when to how we treat each other in daily life or truly difficult circumstances.
The first step is to recognize that activists upset by evil behavior are in NO WAY LESS likely to engage in it. This has been proven time and time again. This proves that intellectual persuasion has little relationship to behavior.
Dostoevsky spoke clearly concerning the tendency of socialist-intellectuals trying to establish utopian governments on earth and prophesied clearly about the result (especially in The Possessed & The Brothers Karamazov). Yet he himself was unable to free himself from wicked behavior.
So the difficult question to address is, what really can change human behavior like this? Or, as Paul expressed it: "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:24). In the following chapter he gave the best solution ever penned, but only those poor in spirit will accept such a word. Especially at the close of this age.
13
@T M
Yours is a deeply penetrating understanding of the human condition. Perhaps the only thing that can change human behavior like this on the part of some of the people is time and space.
In terms of time, we are likely talking about generations. Even then, the latent hatreds that emerged when Yugoslavia broke up, and the ever lasting enmity between Sunnis and Shiites must give us pause.
In terms of space, clearly the cultural disruption of migrants exacerbated by the largely unfiltered propaganda of the internet and fanned by opportunistic power brokers gives the right wing its cause to rally around.
Not sure there is an answer to your question. Humans are tribal, have always been tribal. We need to work solutions with that reality in mind.
4
@T M "That which is hateful to me, I must not do to my neighbor." The Elder Hillel's words predate Christ's and certainly predate Paul's letters to the Romans. Hillel also said, and I'm probably paraphrasing here, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me and if I am only for myself, what am I?" I find it interesting when people, TM included, say they "...are sympathetic...BUT..." TM, and others, characterize those who speak up for themselves and in doing so, speak up for others as "activists." What TM is actually saying is "yes, something happened. Now shut up."
@Debra Merryweather, I am not arguing for silence, but rather depth. Problems are never solved when the root cause is not addressed, and so what I'm proposing is that modern activists consider more carefully the roots of the behavior they're against. Rather than trying to regulate and control people (something only small persons do), honestly look at how even the best among us treat others when we get really irritated. The root is related to that.
I'm glad you feel Hillel spoke the same thing. Regardless of who speaks it, the important point is to take in the truth, digest it, assimilate it, and live it. I believe a wonderful example is provided in the passage I mentioned. They are words that issue from a certain kind of life.
Stanley is right. Germans over the past half-century have invented a cultural fairy tale to lull themselves to sleep and numb them to an unspeakable past—and thanks to this forgetfulness they have become a credit to Europe and to the world, a situation now threatened by a multi-national populist uprising fueled by the excesses of globalism. We should give thanks to forgetfulness. The forgetfulness of a past founded on genocide and slavery was responsible for an American exceptionalism that blessed the world with nearly a century of peace and prosperity. We all forget the slaughtered-animal flesh we ate for breakfast this morning, and the filthy carbon footprint that follows us throughout our day. Forgetting allows us to put the past behind us and shoulder the burdens of the future. All praise to forgetfulness.
15
@Stephen Hoffman
".....American expetionalism blessed the world with peace..."
You might want to check Chile, Central America, the ME disaster,....
Sigh
It's a complex issue and I feel the article doesn't completely do justice to this fact.
It's not a myth that Germany was facing and reckoning with its past successfully. For decades certain showings of national pride and patriotism that were routine in France, Britain or the US were unthinkable in Germany; certain rhetoric that in other places was used to garner votes would have been disqualifying in Germany.
But the "reckoning" is never finished - because that's not really what it is. It's not about guilt for something done in the past, in truth it's about taking responsibility for the future and that means there isn't some point when you're done and can let your guard down, because the future isn't done either.
The rise of the far right in Germany accompanies the refugee crisis. For the first time since the war there has been a plausible occasion to fear the "other" and that has given nationalist rhetoric the foothold in mainstream discussion that it wasn't allowed to get decades prior.
With all that said, I don't think it's correct to connect this rise of the far right with an unfinished or dishonest process of dealing with the past. It's not a comeback of the old right, it's a new right. Specifically, I believe it's unfair to ascribe the arrogance towards Greece that appeared in the Euro-crisis to an ideology that was central to national socialism. At least in my perception, there is a very different thought process behind that (but my comment is getting too long now)
116
@G.B. I have to very strongly disagree with you: This is not a new right and it's not "right". It's very wrong, it's very old ... and it's still very strong.
1
@G.B.
Is intelligent discourse ever 'too long'? You made several excellent points. Thank you.
1
@G.B.
Agreed. This issue is so complex that no article could do the subject complete justice.
For decades now some people have pointed out that the seeds of facisim are still under cover in Germany. But we could say that about many countries with distinctive cultures. Certainly, America should be proud to have played a major role in WWII and with the Marshall Plan fomenting a half century of peace and prosperity in Europe. But we have never really confronted our genocide against the American Indians or the unnecessary wars that we started in Viet Nam and Iraq.
The AFD might be 20% in Germany. That could be dangerous. But look at the higher percentages in other countries. Trumpism is about 33% in America. And another 10% or more think that he is a useful idiot.
So, yes the world is advised to keep an eye on Germany. But we are all best off attending to our own problems.
3
I am deeply moved by this article. I am a German in my mid-30s and have been living abroad for the past decade. My last visit to Germany took place last year after having been away continuously for almost four years. Before I went, friends and family members told me to be prepared for changes - advice I laughed off. But the atmosphere had changed, indeed, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. To me, there seemed to be much more aggression in everyday life, much more preparedness to share racist messages on Whatsapp, much more willingness to blame each and every problem on refugees, much more anxiety and a general feeling of injustice and victimhood. In my experience this self-styled victimhood is even more prevalent in East Germany, where it is reinforced by the older feeling of being treated unfairly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
One sentence you hear very often in Germany these days is “man wird doch noch mal sagen dürfen, dass...”, translating roughly into “well, one should be allowed to say…”, usually followed by a racist or at least generalising remark. Sometimes I cannot help but feel that many Germans welcome the changes in society that allow them to take on the, perceived, comfortable role of victim instead of facing the responsibilities of being the descendants of perpetrators. I worry about what will happen to our society when our sense of propriety and responsibility is replaced by a sense of victimisation that, ultimately, could be used to justify any means.
129
@Kate is it right to condemn Germans as making "racist or at least generalising remarks" when the whole point here seems to be to make "racist or generalising remarks" about Germans? While at the same time ignoring the very real conditions that protesting Germans are concerned about? A man was stabbed to death. That's what prompted the protests in Chemnitz, not some inherent German Nazism.
14
A thought-provoking essay.
Although my grandparents were born in Germany and Central Europe, their own parents had emigrated to America long before the rise of National Socialism. Just lucky, I guess.
I’ve never visited Germany, although I’d like to. My only footsteps on German soil were at Frankfurt Airport to transfer to a Lufthansa flight to Israel, of all places. When I see the German flag waving in Israel, I feel there is hope for the world.
I do believe that German culture and resourcefulness is one of their superior attributes.
It reminds me of Lise Meitner, the unsung German-Jewish physicist who can be called the ‘mother of nuclear fission.’ She could only imagine the immense energy of this process being used for the betterment of the world. She was horrified that it could be used as a weapon.
German intellect can be used for the betterment of the world. Or it can be used to speed the demise of mankind. It has already done so more than once.
26
The backlash against "reckoning for horrendous crimes" is taking place during a slacking-off of the famous German efficiency and work ethic (two clichés about Germany that won't die). Scandals in the automotive industry, roads and transport systems in decline (the DB German railroad is in terrible shape due to lack of investment), major cities with hazardous air pollution levels, and a very large cultural sector that produces little of lasting value. People here just aren't interested in working as hard as the immediate post-war generations did. And interest in excellence is waning.
While there's much talk about integration of immigrants, the integration of the eastern Germans was haphazard after the wall came down. Lots of money was thrown at the restoration of buildings, but jobs remain scarce and incomes low. It's a surprise to no one that the right wing ideology takes hold in the east of Germany, buttressed by neighbors including Poland. One wonders how quickly it will spread west.
45
@Mark G
Look at what's happening here in the U.S. -- it already has.
1
The article states that it's "hard for Americans to understand" this underlying sentiment in Germany but I don't see it that way. It should be easy for Americans to understand given that we also have yet to fully purge our own ideology about the Confederate South or come fully to terms about slavery. The Confederate mindset is still alive and well in the US with occasion threats of succession and a desire to return to the perceived glory days when the southern states (and by extension its people) were powerful and had a different way of life. The Civil War in the US was akin to the Treaty of Versailles for Germany.
140
Totally agree that this is a wonderful article. But Jeff B is also right pointing to America's divisions past and present. Focused as this article is on Germany and Mr Stanley's Jewish background if we zoom out the picture widens to include all of humanity and whoever the "other" d' jour for those inclined to find easy enemies. Modern electronic communication unites fearful and angry people. Makes this human tendency worse. Technology is not going away and people are not likely to change.
30
@Larry Oswald
And let's acknowledge the basic human tendency to embrace fear of the unknown and externalize blame to "out groups." Such instincts, when left unchecked, result in subjugation, oppression, and aggression, whether you're talking about the racism-based slavery or Holocaust. The United States is experiencing a shocking but not surprising resurgence of these regrettable human impulses just as are Germany, Sweden, and many other countries today.
@JeffB
While we're citing parallels, I'd like to point out that it is not a coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence in the 1920s at the same time Hitler and Mussolini were gaining power in Europe. The Klan was the American stage of the growth of fascism. The Klan and the Nazis were still teamed up ("Unite the Right") at Charlottesville last year.
2