--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Are you kidding me, or have things changed that much
> in 30 years? Meine Mutter war so ashamed of being
Neither am I kidding you, nor have things really changed that much in the past 30 years.
The truth is, any sort of widespread feeling of guilt over the Holocaust never really existed in either of the two German states (as opposed to State atonement rituals in vogue for the past decade or so).
What has changed in the past 15 years since the fall of the wall has been a new tendency for national self-pity and ressentiment. Like I said, Germans have settled into their new role as the "real" victims of the second World War.
People like your mother are the exception, not the rule. What do you think one of the main motivations behind the 1968 movement was? The National Socialist past became an issue precisely *because* the generation that lived through it refused to make it an issue.
East Germany wasn't any better, by the way. The form of national self-denial there took the form of conveniently claiming the heritage of Communist resistance fighters. Thus conveniently whitewashing the personal history of every individual German in the Soviet occupation zone by automatically declaring them all anti-fascists. The fruits of this are evident in the high level of fascist sympathies in the contemporary east of Germany.
Starry-eyed Anglo-American fans of films like "Good Bye, Lenin" tend to ignore the populist, ressentiment-driven character of contemporary "anti-capitalism" in the East.
A popular slogan of the Antifa movement in the 1990s was "Bomber Harris, do it again!"
> German that she didn't even teach me and my sister
> the
> language, with the result that I couldn't talk to my
> grandmother until I was in my 20s. Screw the
> collective guilt thing.
>
> --- Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> Ahmadinejad is behind the times. Germans as a
> collective national entity have long since stopped
> feeling any sense of guilt or responsibility for the
> Holocaust.
>
>
> Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
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