"Watching America," the website to which this German article refers, is not an easy read for most Americans, I would imagine. I know it isn't for this American, but I read it, every day.
We highly recommend it, especially for Americans, nevertheless. We need to know what te rest of the world is thinking and feeling, because it does matter.
SPIEGEL Surfs the Web: Mirror, Mirror on the Web - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:
"A new Web site offers a portal of daily news about the United States from non-US sources. To our American friends out there: after finishing your daily diet of the usual English-language newspaper and corn flakes, you might want to pay Watching America a visit."
I, especially, feel heartened by the above, leading paragraph.
That we have friends in Germany, among it's people, is tremendously important to me and, I believe, to the America peace movement and resistance to Bush foreign policiy. The reasons for that humble, very personal opinion go way back, yet recently I have longed for conversations with Germans, especially those who remember the years under Hitler.
The German people have more to teach us than those of any other country on earth and the lessons are long over-due.
A short personal history, for purposes of clarity:
I was born three years after VE Day. With the war fresh in the memories of my parents, I had a very early "education" all about WWII, the war with Germany and the Holocaust. My father was far more affected by the Great Depression than was my mother. Mother was greatly affected by the Holocaust. The films that came back from Germany, of the starving, tortured and, finally, murdered Jews was seared into her psyche. We were not Jewish.
Nevertheless, she never blamed the German people. She did not hate the German people anymore than she would hate a whole race of people.
While many Americans wanted to believe that the Holocaust and the aggression of Adolph Hitler were sign of a basic flaw in the character of the German people, Mother always said that was hogwash. (That theory was disproved by a social psychologist in America. He found that, given the right circumstances, we are all capable, to some degree of atrocities.) So, as always, Mother, it turned out, had been right-on.
She always warned me; "Don't ever think that it cannot happen here, because it can. It can happen anywhere."
Probably because of Mother's continuing interest in what happened in Germany, I, too, became interested in studying Hitler. In my chosen field of psycholgy, he, and others of his ilk, became a sources of great interest.
In the last 4 years, I have become far more interested in knowing about the German people, of Hitler's era, as well as Germans who have been born since WWII; what are they thinking, what can they tell us?
There was a time that merely hearing a German accent caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end. But to day, that is the accent I long to hear.
I have watched the German people endure their recent history with grace and dignity.
We could Learn a lot from them, if we could only let go of the denial enought to know, that it is happening here.
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