I was hardly predisposed to be sympathetic to the Germans. My father was a Polish Army officer who fought the German invaders in 1939. I was born after World War II, but my Polish-American upbringing included a steady stream of horror stories from the war. Despite the friendships I made in Germany, I often bridled at public behavior that reinforced many of the negative stereotypes of “the Germans” that I grew up with. But to my mind, Niklas’s raw, brutal honesty exemplifies what is best about the Germans today–their willingness to confront their country’s past. No other country has examined its dark side as fully as Germany has.
The average German is exposed to countless classroom lessons, TV discussions, movies and books on the subject. Not everyone is pleased by this rich, almost masochistic diet. Germany has its tiny minority of neo-Nazis, and a larger number of people who, while condemning the past, would like to stop its endless exhumation. German corporate giants and the government recently agreed to pay more than $10 billion as compensation for surviving slave and forced laborers, but some businessmen privately complain about the “blackmail” tactics from Jewish organizations. By and large, however, Germans have accepted that their atonement will never end. As Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, a German-born Jew, put it, “There’s no end of history, also no final tally, no fully new beginning.” Fears that a newly assertive, unified Germany will try to slide around that truth have proven vastly exaggerated.
At times, I cringed when I heard about the insults Germans regularly have to endure. As exchange students in American high schools, the children of friends have found themselves called “Nazis.” A Taiwanese company selling German space heaters recently launched an ad campaign featuring a smiling face of Hitler. A company spokesman blandly explained: “We decided to use Hitler because as soon as you see him, you think of Germany.”
But I have to be honest: it can be hard to be consistently sympathetic to the Germans. For all their legitimate gripes, some of today’s Germans can still exhibit an infuriating dedication to Ordnung–order. Early in our stay, my wife double-parked for a moment in front of our apartment building on a dead-end street to unload her groceries. A young woman roared up and honked angrily. Ignoring my wife’s signals that she was just putting the groceries on the steps and would be moving in a few seconds, the woman jumped out and began writing down our license-plate number. Start a discussion of such incidents with foreigners living in Germany and the stories spill out. Some sound like parodies. When an American woman jaywalked, a policeman drove by and shouted: “I hope you’re run over the next time.”
That said, many Germans I knew were just as appalled by this behavior as any outsider–and willing to say so. Openness has its limits: Germans understandably tiptoe around Jewish issues. But there’s a growing fascination with Judaism and Jewish history. Once I even encountered a bit of risky humor, mocking German stereotypes of Jews. I asked a university student why she had chosen Jewish studies as her field, and she laughed: “Because I want to find a rich Jewish husband.”
I don’t mean to minimize any of the problems that still exist, but my experiences taught me to be wary of the familiar–and easy–impulse to generalize about the Germans. It’s a habit Germany’s neighbors have long indulged in. As Niklas Frank points out, that’s hardly surprising. Germany and the Germans are changing, but the world will always lag behind in giving credit where credit is due.
