“I grew up with the Knowledge of the Holocaust. But the view in the present shows that We need to talk more about it! Thus, the wheel of history is spinning backwards,” says DW-author Felix punch wine.
“At the time, it was the Jews…Today it is the Black, here are the students… Tomorrow it will be, perhaps, the White, the Christians and the officials…” in the Preface of the novel, “at that Time it was Friedrich” by Hans Peter Richter. We read the book in the mid-noughties years in the English teaching of the 6. Class – my first contact with the history of the persecution of Jews in Germany.
“The Officials?”, I wondered as, at the time, eleven-year-old reflexively and term in the same moment, the message of these lines. From then on, the history of the Nazi didn’t let go of me-time and of the Holocaust. She accompanied me through the whole school time – whether in history class, in German, English or French: We watched “Schindler’s list” or “life is beautiful”. We saw plays, visited museums, education, and memorials. Even at the dinner at the kitchen table, the Holocaust could be issue. At night, the documentaries and feature films flickered on the TV screen.
Film still from the Oscar-winning tragi-Comedy “life is beautiful”
A country facing up to its history – as I have experienced it as an adolescent. In the Generation of my grandparents on the other hand? There was a Silence. In courts, ministries, classrooms and lecture theatres, at home on the Couch – everywhere there were Nazis in the sound information. Only the ‘ 68 began to ask the question: “What happened?”
The Holocaust is part of German identity
I grew up with but with the Knowledge of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust. It is part of my identity. For me, it is part of German identity, even if many do not want to have the true today. To me the pictures and reports from the Nazi time surreal appear downright fake. And how should repeat all of this?
And yet it is possible. The risk to underestimate, would be naive, even dangerous. Because systems can change. Often this happens gradually, so you barely notice it – until it is too late. This must be of my Generation aware of who knows nothing except peace. Because even after 1945, there has been another war in Europe. Even after 1945, genocides have taken place: Whether in Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar, or in our immediate neighbourhood on the Balkans. Who can be sure that it will also happen in Germany again?
Myanmar to 2018 – people fleeing from persecution
It is not about blame, but about responsibility
Thus, the wheel of history turns backward, it takes education. Germany has worked up to its fascist past – in contrast to, say, Italy or Japan. But the warning signs are not overlooked: police officers to protect synagogues and other Jewish institutions. Anti-Semitic and racist crime. In the Bundestag, as in all the 16 land days, a party is seated, the leading heads of the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship as a “bird shit” in German history and the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” to defame.
AfD leader Alexander Gauland: Nazi dictatorship a “bird shit” in German history
Many of the rights to inveigh against a historical “guilt” of the Germans. It is not a debt. I am, or the young people of my Generation are to “blame” for the actions of our great-grandfathers and mothers? Hardly.
Nevertheless, we do not bear responsibility for the darkest Chapter of our history is not repeated. Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker has it at 8. In may 1985, 40. The anniversary of the end of the war, thus expressed: “Whoever closes his eyes to the past becomes blind to the present. Who doesn’t want to remember the inhumanity that is again vulnerable to new Infection.” He was right.
School groups should visit a concentration camp
Soon there will be no witnesses. What remains to us are their voices, their books and letters. However, the emotions threaten to fade. A year before my graduation, my class visited the memorial site of the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. I stand with my own feet on the floor of the gas chambers, saw with their own eyes the piles of shoes, hair, and suitcases of murdered men, women, and children. The impressions have burned deep in my memory: “Never again Auschwitz!”
Entrance gate and rail to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Perhaps the visit of a concentration camp-has a teaching, each school memorial more effectively than any history book or any movie. From all over the world, people come to us. The Holocaust may not be part of your story. Still, I find: Who lives in Germany, you should deal with it like all the others. Because the history of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust is the history of mankind. She teaches, what did people in certain circumstances is capable of. And this realization is everyone’s business.