On heroes.
A few weeks ago, I did a posting on elections in Germany and something in that sparked the idea to do some other "Germans explained for the world" postings now and then. So far:
On elections.
Today's posting was inspired by me reading yet another WWII novel taking place in WWII London ("Liverpool Street" by Anne C. Voorhoeve, will write a review once I read two or three more books) and some questions this provoked but which had been lurking for maybe already a while. Anyway, here we go:
What I was wondering about was... an overwhelming amount of the WWII books I read in the last two or three years (or maybe for even longer) were actually written by British or American authors (with Voorhoeve as an exception) and somewhere along the way I started feeling like I was cheering for and being excited for borrowed heroes. With one exception (Phillipa and her family in Voorhoeve's "Einundzwanzigster Juli") all of the protagonists were Brits, Americans or other members of the Allied countries. With an impliciteness that kind of astounded me I was able to follow them in their adventures and it actually took me a while to see that the ones they fought against, that they cursed, that they hated could have been my grandparents (one of my grandfathers was part of the crew of U-505 when the Americans seized it, the other one was severely wounded in a battle against Canadians).
It was this easiness and willingness to accept - and understand - people from nations other than my own that caused me to ponder the general relationship between Germans and the concept of heroism. Of course my first conclusion was that well... there aren't that many people we could be proud of from WWII, seeing as we actually started it with unprovokedly attacking Poland and that all of which happened then could only happen because the vast majority of Germans either chose to close their eyes to what was happening or were willing participants. Not much space for heroes there.
But then I remembered that one of my pet topics in school - and beyond - had been German resistance in the Third Reich and that goddammit, there were more persons than Stauffenberg, Tresckow and Goerdeler that had tried to resist. There were the women of Rosenstraße in Berlin, a widespread network of communist, socialist and socialdemocratic activists (one of them "working class hero" Ernst Thälmann, who was interned and died in Buchenwald), the group around Hans and Sophie Scholl... you'd think we had some very good reasons to be extraordinarily proud of this "other Germany"... but being Germans, we always manage to find a fly in the ointment.
And because we're so creative, we find another one for every WWII hero we could have. Stauffenberg and the circles surrounding him were of course just arch-conservative militaristic reactionaries who had questionable political visions (seriously, that's how they talk in my circle of co-workers about them... while it is true that they were neither revolutionaries nor progressive democrats in a contemporary sense, what they attempted was still unbelievably brave), the Scholl siblings were at least fascinated with the Nazis in the beginning (yeah, well, no one of today can claim with a good conscious that he or she wouldn't have been), the women of Rosenstraße didn't resist out of political but out of strictly personal reasons (ah, so only resistance that follows political motivation is real resistance...)... and from people not left-side the communist activists get fire because of their ties to Stalin and the question whether communists and national socialists aren't closer to each other than they like to admit...
Well, you see we obviously have a problem with heroes and heroism, most of all a problem with heroes of our own nationality. It translates as far as today, at least in regard to soldiers and uniformed personnel in general. A German soldier will never be a hero here, even though we're now part of the "good guys" (but then again, the world has become so complicated that often enough you can't be really sure if there actually are good guys). If you go looking around for something like Arlington National Cemetery you'll simply not find it, not even for the time after WWII. You'll find small weathered WWI and WWII memorials in most villages and some international soldiers' cemeteries (and of course the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin-Treptow and Schinkel's Neue Wache in Berlin-Mitte, tomb of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim), but no central memorial to or cemetery for fallen Bundeswehr soldiers (there are plans for a memorial but the overall reaction in the population is either indifference or open refusal, out of several reasons). You will probably never find a German equivalent to songs like Trace Adkins' "Arlington". So no military heroes for us (but maybe a posting on Germans and their Armed Forces in the near future for you...).
Which still leaves civilian heroes. Mh. We do have them. And we do give them the credit they deserve. However... no one would get the idea of actually calling them heroes. You'll find no newspaper here calling a person who rescues another one to be called a hero. You also won't a fireperson be called a hero because he or she did something that was heroic. Germans don't like that word, and I have the feeling that it has a lot to do with WWII (I guess I also owe you a posting on how WWII shaped the German mentality for at least another 50 years) and also with the GDR, mostly for people having grown up and lived in East Germany before the wall came down. Contrary to today, there even were medals for it: Hero of the German Democratic Republic and Hero of Labor. We also had "working class heroes" (the above mentioned Ernst Thälmann, for example) and of course Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were also heroes. But then again... the GDR was pretty... selective in who could be called a hero and who couldn't (Stauffenberg was definitely not a GDR hero... but General Friedrich Paulus maybe was, having surrendered Stalingrad to the Red Army and later being crucial in establishing the NVA, the GDR's Army).
So we had two dictatorships which both compromised and twisted the meaning of the word "hero" enough that probably generations of Germans will feel ill at ease when using it. I'm not quite sure if that's a good or a bad thing. All I know is that I don't understand how anyone today could still fall for extreme right wing Pied Pipers who pervert every concept, every tradition and every symbol they find if it's of use for them so that it'll be tainted for all following generations. The NPD a patriotic political party? Yeah, my ass. Idiots, the whole lot of them. Today's heroes, to come back to my initial topic, are those speaking and acting against all the nazis still existing here and everywhere... and they deserve to be called so.
On elections.
Today's posting was inspired by me reading yet another WWII novel taking place in WWII London ("Liverpool Street" by Anne C. Voorhoeve, will write a review once I read two or three more books) and some questions this provoked but which had been lurking for maybe already a while. Anyway, here we go:
What I was wondering about was... an overwhelming amount of the WWII books I read in the last two or three years (or maybe for even longer) were actually written by British or American authors (with Voorhoeve as an exception) and somewhere along the way I started feeling like I was cheering for and being excited for borrowed heroes. With one exception (Phillipa and her family in Voorhoeve's "Einundzwanzigster Juli") all of the protagonists were Brits, Americans or other members of the Allied countries. With an impliciteness that kind of astounded me I was able to follow them in their adventures and it actually took me a while to see that the ones they fought against, that they cursed, that they hated could have been my grandparents (one of my grandfathers was part of the crew of U-505 when the Americans seized it, the other one was severely wounded in a battle against Canadians).
It was this easiness and willingness to accept - and understand - people from nations other than my own that caused me to ponder the general relationship between Germans and the concept of heroism. Of course my first conclusion was that well... there aren't that many people we could be proud of from WWII, seeing as we actually started it with unprovokedly attacking Poland and that all of which happened then could only happen because the vast majority of Germans either chose to close their eyes to what was happening or were willing participants. Not much space for heroes there.
But then I remembered that one of my pet topics in school - and beyond - had been German resistance in the Third Reich and that goddammit, there were more persons than Stauffenberg, Tresckow and Goerdeler that had tried to resist. There were the women of Rosenstraße in Berlin, a widespread network of communist, socialist and socialdemocratic activists (one of them "working class hero" Ernst Thälmann, who was interned and died in Buchenwald), the group around Hans and Sophie Scholl... you'd think we had some very good reasons to be extraordinarily proud of this "other Germany"... but being Germans, we always manage to find a fly in the ointment.
And because we're so creative, we find another one for every WWII hero we could have. Stauffenberg and the circles surrounding him were of course just arch-conservative militaristic reactionaries who had questionable political visions (seriously, that's how they talk in my circle of co-workers about them... while it is true that they were neither revolutionaries nor progressive democrats in a contemporary sense, what they attempted was still unbelievably brave), the Scholl siblings were at least fascinated with the Nazis in the beginning (yeah, well, no one of today can claim with a good conscious that he or she wouldn't have been), the women of Rosenstraße didn't resist out of political but out of strictly personal reasons (ah, so only resistance that follows political motivation is real resistance...)... and from people not left-side the communist activists get fire because of their ties to Stalin and the question whether communists and national socialists aren't closer to each other than they like to admit...
Well, you see we obviously have a problem with heroes and heroism, most of all a problem with heroes of our own nationality. It translates as far as today, at least in regard to soldiers and uniformed personnel in general. A German soldier will never be a hero here, even though we're now part of the "good guys" (but then again, the world has become so complicated that often enough you can't be really sure if there actually are good guys). If you go looking around for something like Arlington National Cemetery you'll simply not find it, not even for the time after WWII. You'll find small weathered WWI and WWII memorials in most villages and some international soldiers' cemeteries (and of course the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin-Treptow and Schinkel's Neue Wache in Berlin-Mitte, tomb of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim), but no central memorial to or cemetery for fallen Bundeswehr soldiers (there are plans for a memorial but the overall reaction in the population is either indifference or open refusal, out of several reasons). You will probably never find a German equivalent to songs like Trace Adkins' "Arlington". So no military heroes for us (but maybe a posting on Germans and their Armed Forces in the near future for you...).
Which still leaves civilian heroes. Mh. We do have them. And we do give them the credit they deserve. However... no one would get the idea of actually calling them heroes. You'll find no newspaper here calling a person who rescues another one to be called a hero. You also won't a fireperson be called a hero because he or she did something that was heroic. Germans don't like that word, and I have the feeling that it has a lot to do with WWII (I guess I also owe you a posting on how WWII shaped the German mentality for at least another 50 years) and also with the GDR, mostly for people having grown up and lived in East Germany before the wall came down. Contrary to today, there even were medals for it: Hero of the German Democratic Republic and Hero of Labor. We also had "working class heroes" (the above mentioned Ernst Thälmann, for example) and of course Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were also heroes. But then again... the GDR was pretty... selective in who could be called a hero and who couldn't (Stauffenberg was definitely not a GDR hero... but General Friedrich Paulus maybe was, having surrendered Stalingrad to the Red Army and later being crucial in establishing the NVA, the GDR's Army).
So we had two dictatorships which both compromised and twisted the meaning of the word "hero" enough that probably generations of Germans will feel ill at ease when using it. I'm not quite sure if that's a good or a bad thing. All I know is that I don't understand how anyone today could still fall for extreme right wing Pied Pipers who pervert every concept, every tradition and every symbol they find if it's of use for them so that it'll be tainted for all following generations. The NPD a patriotic political party? Yeah, my ass. Idiots, the whole lot of them. Today's heroes, to come back to my initial topic, are those speaking and acting against all the nazis still existing here and everywhere... and they deserve to be called so.