Not Another History Lesson!

I can still remember the first time I walked past the black swastika sprayed on the wall with spray paint, large and boldly. As a ninth grader, I had just moved to the North Rhine Valley with my parents from the USA and could not believe it. So all the rumours I had heard were true — Germany really was full of Neo-Nazis!

Coming from the USA, I had heard many generalizations about the Germans, statements like: "Oh, look at what they did" and "they are all at fault for the Anti-Semitism in the world." Yet, I did not meet one German who still hated Jews. Not one of my friends or any other young people had any reason to carry Anti-Semitism, and they were certainly not evil people who would murder! I encountered almost the opposite: instead of a country of Nazi supporters, very few people in my new school thought much about the Nazis or the Holocaust. Nobody noticed the swastika on the wall anymore; after all, it had probably been there for a long time.

Over the next two years, I sat through many history classes, studying numerous battles, hard-won Victories, and hearing about many injustices done to the Fatherland through various wars. Occasionally, my class came across pictures of barbed wire and concentration camps in our textbooks, and our teacher briefly explained what we were seeing each time, which to me seemed insufficient. I wondered that my friends were thinking, and sometimes asked them what they knew about the Nazis. Of course, they had heard about Hitler and his government. But this subject died pretty fast among us; even for me it quickly became too historical and morbid to talk about. For us, the Holocaust was far removed by decades since and we say no point in talking about it for very long.

I had learned my share of Nazi history and visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to find out about the atrocities that occurred during Hitler's regime. The stories I had read there and the pictures on display affected me deeply and I began to wonder if I had some kind of obligation to learn about this terrible time. My family carries a history of Nazism, my grandfather being a soldier and prisoner of war in World War Two and my great grandfather a fully trained SA trooper. The knowledge of my family's history had disturbed me as I walked through this museum in Washington DC. The families of all my German middle-class friends carried almost identical histories, yet none of them wanted to know much about it. We were all thinking, "Why should we be responsible for things our great-grandparents did?"

The way our history teacher told us about the Holocaust made it seem strictly historical. The facts and dates in our books bored us, and I wondered how this could be the same period in history that I had learned about in the United States. As German students in Germany, where all the human injustice occurred, we could not feel any sympathy with the Jews or any sense of shock over what the Nazis did to them. This was only because of the superficial way history was portrayed to us.

In actuality, the atrocities committed in our country by the Nazis were horrible and all the stories are heart breaking. Families suffered for years as they were brutally separated and killed. The concentration camps with their high walls and barbed wire still stand on German ground as reminders of these terrible years of suffering.

When I asked my grandparents about their experiences during Hitler's regime, they were reluctant to remember that time. For them, survival under wartime conditions was enough of a challenge. The pressures to join the Hitler Youth were very strong, and young people saw only the noble and patriotic ideals in all the propaganda. My grandfather told me that he never heard of the crimes against the Jews until very late in the war. Even though he was a German soldier, he never saw any of the concentration camps or even heard about them. My grandmother could only remember a childhood ruined by the constant threat of invasion and bombings, and survived many of these.

And yet, because of the acts of a few politicians who were consumed by hatred, the history of Germany carries an inerasable mark of shame. If we remain ignorant and indifferent to the suffering of the Jews, we are denying the evil that took place in our country. Those Germans that deny the Holocaust are known as Neo-Nazis and are directly continuing the hatred that ran the Nazi Party from the beginning. Have we, the young people of Germany, thought about the crimes committed to the Jews in our country? Do we care to hear the memories and feelings of guilt burned into our grandparents' minds?

Two years ago, I was walking down the stairs in the German high school, and a classmate called another boy a "silly Jew" because of an accidental shove. Did he realize what he meant by this statement? Well, how should he, coming from a history class like the one we had just finished?

As German young people, we have an obligation to our grandparents and great grandparents who lived through this period in history and feel guilty about it. The Holocaust is not just history, and we should be able to learn about it in ways that are truthful and painful. This is our Germany, our own history, our families! There is only hope for the future if we know the truth about the past and can talk about it.