Have you ever been to the country whose heritage you claim?
I’m unable to imagine how you’ve come to this conclusion. Nothing you’ve said is accurate, so there’s nowhere to start, really.
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Yes, I have tried to articulate a point, but am doing it very poorly. Of course many of those memorialized there are German citizens. I should have waited to post after I had a better way to express my point.
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Not really.
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Yes, they should know. But some people are slow and insensitive, and there is little about this memorial that would give them a hint. To the contrary, its openness encourages casual behaviour. It is open to all sides, at the center of Germany’s single most touristy spot, there are food places nearby; although it is not small by area, it is not of significant height, sloping gently below ground level; etc.
I don’t condone the behavior displayed on “Yolocaust”, but I think the satirist is hitting at pawns here. I believe that the memorial itself is kind of broken by design, caused by the weird discourse from which it emerged.
This thing has a bit of backstory. For example, Germany’s official Jewish community never got behind it. Their late speaker, Ignatz Bubis, once remarked something to the effect that this was a memorial by non-Jews, for non-Jews, and that his community was not involved, and did not want to be involved with this particular memorial.
A previous design, that would have involved carvings of all(!) known names of Holocaust victims, was denied under the Kohl government. And while right-wingers still foam against the current memorial and call it a “place of shame”, etc., it really appears to have been a compromise between having no memorial at all and having something really vague and unobtrusive.
Some say this is a place for the Germans to celebrate their vindication of past crimes more than anything else. I don’t think this was the architect’s intention, but he did confirm that he intended it to be open and vague, which lent itself perfectly to such German sensitivities.
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They did somehow manage to tag their photos with “Holocaust Memorial” (and at least one pair went as far as “jumping on dead Jews”) so I don’t think it was a case of misunderstanding the purpose of the site they were visiting.
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There is probably no way for me to accurately state what I am trying to say. In that sentence, at a minimum, I should have said that they do not want to think about it very much.
So I will try again. If the purpose of memorials is to connect people to their past, That goal can be problematic for Germans. Part of the genesis for the “Murdered Jews of Europe” memorial was controversy about the Neue Wache memorial in it’s current state, and debate over who can be considered a victim. And any memorial to the War brings up the controversy of whether the German people were liberated from Nazism, or whether they were simply defeated, and bear a collective responsibility for all of the crimes of the Nazis. Even this is an oversimplification. When I speak to Germans about war remembrances, they often mutter about the “verdammt Weltkrieg”. It is not a happy topic. And I know of few places where there has been more controversy about how memorials are to be constructed, and what message they should convey. A notable exception might be the “Komm, Frau” statue in Gdansk.
I might note that selfie taking is also sometimes an issue at Japanese memorials, including memorials to the civilian dead.
I will leave the subject, and apologize in advance if I have erred yet again.
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I think my whole point, with Mr. Shapira as well as with you, is that I’m not really interested in talking morality. What is the point in guessing whether this or that individual person is an actual antisemite, or just a careless person. What is the the point in that. I’m trying to convey some of the discourse that formed the memorial that gives these people a ready stage to do what they do. You don’t (or rarely) see people act like that in the Berlin Jewish Museum, or at the Buchenwald museum. The place does matter, and how it came to be tells us a lot more than how this or that schmuck behaves on his holiday.
So, they DO just tell everyone they were on vacation?
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I do not know how you choose the Germans you talk to, but your sample seems to skew towards the right just a little bit. I don’t doubt that someone told you those things, but they are not representative of Germany as a whole.
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They are the generation who were old enough to have participated in the war.
If there is one thing that generation is famous for, then it is impeccable judgment in those matters.
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You’ve talked to the whole generation?
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Yes, I interviewed every single survivor of the war, including the Germans expelled from Sudetenland, all the Japanese survivors of Island warfare, and the Japanese survivors of the fire bombings. I have been very busy.
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Ah, you left out the Poles, the Jews, the Swedes, the Russians, the Italians, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Italians, … c’mon, man, it was a World War. You think that you can interview the surviving nationals of just two out of three of the Axis powers and call it a day? Get back to work!
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It’s a small world after all.
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Apparently! I did just learn some new German vocabulary, though. I linked my fiancee (who is German) to a few specific posts on this thread, and now I’ve learned some entertaining words from listening to her! She’s even being kind enough to repeat some of them!
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