{"id":41,"date":"2004-10-01T20:30:58","date_gmt":"2004-10-02T00:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all-the-who"},"modified":"2004-10-01T20:30:58","modified_gmt":"2004-10-02T00:30:58","slug":"trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all-the-whole-post","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all-the-whole-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Trying to Make Sense of It All — The Whole Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Trying to make sense
\nof it all is impossible, certainly in this medium.  Hopefully this
\ntrip helped me understand, and to a certain extent raised, certain
\nquestions:  trying to figure out how I feel about Germany, Poland,
\nand Europe as a whole in light of the Holocaust and the Jews’ sad
\nhistory there; and attempting to understand how in the world the
\nHolocaust could have happened.  <\/span><\/p>\n

This is more an essay than a post, so
\nI’ve written about various aspects of these questions and linked to
\nthem rather than making one GINORMOUS post that will take you forever
\nto read.<\/p>\n

Germany<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/font>It all started before
\nI even got to Germany.  A friend of mine wrote about her trip to
\nBerlin and prefaced it by saying that she had never had any use for
\nGermany and never wanted to set foot in the country, and in fact had
\navoided it in her extensive previous travel through Europe.  <\/span><\/p>\n

I shared this sentiment with my
\nGerman friend Melanie, who took umbrage at it.  She said that the
\nwar was 60 years ago and it was offensive to think that Germany is like
\nthat now.  Melanie feels that her generation is not anti-Semitic
\nand just wants to move on.  In Mel’s opinion, because of WWII, it
\nis still not permissible in German society to say anything positive
\nabout Germans, and she finds that really stifling.  “I want to be
\nproud of my country,” she told me.   “Nationalism is
\noverrated,” I replied, and a falsehood anyway designed to manipulate
\npeople’s natural desire to belong to a group of people that they feel
\nare “like them.”  <\/span><\/p>\n

But Mel has a point, and that is, do
\nwe punish today’s generation for what happened 60 years ago?  We
\nare talking now about a generation that has grown up with full
\nknowledge of what happened.  And most if not all 20-something
\nGerman youths – hopefully, not just the liberal ones – remember the day
\nthey learned for the first time about the Holocaust, and the subsequent
\nidentity crisis that this spawned.  We did this?  How could
\nsuch a thing happen?  Mel’s friend Daniela related just such an
\nexperience to me in Berlin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another friend of Melanie’s,
\nChristine, is a history teacher, and she told me that, not
\nsurprisingly, by far her students are most interested in the WWII
\nperiod of German history, and specifically, the question of how such a
\nthing could happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then again, in the grand scheme of
\nthings 60 years is not a very long time, especially because no one
\ntalked openly about it for twenty or thirty years after it happened.
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

Melanie and Daniela were fascinated
\nwhen I told them about how learning about the Holocaust left me with
\nsome very strong associations – as a child, just hearing the German
\nlanguage spoken left me fearful and uneasy.  They had absolutely
\nno inkling of what it was like to feel afraid you might get messed
\nwith, or even be in danger, just because of who you are.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those of you who have been reading
\nthis blog from the start know how I am leaning on this issue.  I
\ndon’t hate Germany or Germans, certainly not the youth.  Also, as
\nI have thought about this issue, it has often occurred to me that given
\nthe Jews’ history in Europe, perhaps this could have taken place
\nanywhere in Europe, and maybe it only happened in Germany because there
\nhappened to be a fascist dictator there who was bent on destroying a
\nminority.  <\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, while I was on
\nthis trip, far-right parties made large gains in the former East
\nGermany, and Daniela told me some disturbing stories about run-ins with
\nformer East Berliners who were doing work on her apartment and were
\nvisibly disturbed about the fact that she had a Turkish roommate.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Something Melanie said was even more
\ndisturbing.  She had a realization recently that caused her some
\nalarm, and that realization was that in the period immediately before
\nthe war, many Jews had become quite successful and were becoming deeply
\nintegrated into German society.  Had the Holocaust not happened,
\nshe wondered, would some other purge have occurred?  Melanie is
\nnot sure the German majority “would have allowed” the Jews to continue
\nto be as successful, or powerful in German society. <\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, I’m not much closer to
\nany answers than before this trip.  But hopefully I’m asking some
\nof the right questions.  <\/span>
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\nEurope<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/font>It has occurred to me
\n– I’m certainly not the first – that the Holocaust could possibly have
\nhappened in any country in Europe and it just happened to be in
\nGermany.  Without question, Jewish history is filled with
\nexpulsions, discrimination, humiliation, and vicious, brutal, sadistic
\nviolence, often at the hands of friends and neighbors.  (In some
\nrespects, Zionism was a response to this history, that response being,
\n“Screw this, we’re outta here.”)  <\/span><\/p>\n

You could say that Europe never
\nworked out for the Jews, which the possible exception of the 19th
\nCentury, when Jews were “emancipated” and received equal rights all
\nover Europe.  But we all know how that turned out.<\/span>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trying to make sense of it all is impossible, certainly in this medium.  Hopefully this trip helped me understand, and to a certain extent raised, certain questions:  trying to figure out how I feel about Germany, Poland, and Europe as a whole in light of the Holocaust and the Jews’ sad history there; and attempting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1155,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-41","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jackstriptoeurope\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}