On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Chris Doss wrote:
> All this means is that both Heidegger and Ratzinger lived in Germany in
> the 1930s and 1940s. Everybody in R's age cohort was in the Hitler Youth.
And participating in the air defense corps as an under-17-year-old was always considered by Germans to be something to be proud of, since they thought of it as purely defense of the homeland. And they thought of the people who did it as children, children who were being bombed.
That cohort, the ones who were old enough to man the flak cannons but not old enough to enter the army proper, has always been considered in Germany to be the first generation that could be considered clean. They are called the 29ers in the same way a later generation is called the 68ers, except that where the later referred to the generation's defining moment of glory, the former generation referred to its defining birth year. If you were born in 1929, you would have been 16 in 1945. And that would have given you what this generation considered its defining experience: old enough to suffer and remember the war, but not old to have been guilty.
Most members of this generation were in fact born a few years earlier than that (Ratzinger for example in 1927). They are called the 29ers because that is the last year you could be born and still be considered part of it. Habermas, btw, is part of this generation. He manned the air-defense cannons when he was 16 and never saw it as something to apologize for. And it goes without saying that everybody manning the guns was in the Hitler Youth.
Fun footnote: this is where we get our word flak from: Flug Abwehr Kannonen. Although in German of course that's all one word.
Fun recommendation: if you are one of those who enjoy the trope of mocking Ratzinger as Nazinger, you might enjoy Kenny Goldsmith's radio show from 4.20.2005:
It's in both real audio and MP3 format. Kenny is a long-time freeform DJ with an unbelievably large collection of weird recordings. He's also a random word poet and in general, a smart and very silly man. And yesterday he intercut his whole show with a near hysterical cackle of mockery, where he just kept cutting in the words "Cardinal Ratzinger" said over and over with an absurdly rolled Germanic R, and spliced in with gratuitous allusions to Adolf Hitler's birthday, which was also yesterday. It's not argument, it's playground taunting, and it's not for the freeform averse. But Ratzinazi mockers might get a kick out of it.
Michael