There are some posts of which about 50 variations exist already, yet people have to express the same idea again and again. “Germany has learned from history” is one of them.
You know what happened after visiting a concentration camp in 9th grade? All of these German kids still thought it was funny to make “press on the gas” jokes to the bus driver, tell each other holocaust jokes, literally minutes after walking out of a former concentration camp and a day after hearing a Jewish concentration camp survivor who now lived in the US talking about how daily life changed in 1933 until his family fled some years later. My friends have similar stories about their school visit to concentration camps.
i’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with there’s never the question of “well, there were many sides”, but some kids, upon reading the 25 point plan, did start arguing in my history class that this shows that not all Germans who voted NSDAP were necessarily evil anti-semites. (They just didn’t feel strongly about the rights of Jewish people.)
Anyway, Germans always talk about “learning from our past”. But how can the murders by the NSU be considered part of this country’s “past”? Where they didn’t even bother to investigate whether maybe it could be related to neo-nazis; instead they further traumatised the nine families by accusing them of being involved in the murder, or being at fault because they were supposedly involved with organised crime. The boulevard press called these “the kebab murders”. After the nail bomb attack of Cologne with 22 injured people, a kid said in a documentary about it that when he said to a police officer “that was nazis”, the police offer told him that he never wanted to hear something like that from any of them again, and that seems to be representative of the work of German law enforcement.
It’s common knowledge if you’re not ethnically German that you just don’t travel alone through East Germany by public means of transport. Countries issue warnings to their citizens to not travel to East Germany in general, and the reaction of the German public somehow is to talk about how this isn’t representative of Germany and makes us look bad, because Germany looking bad is obviously the most important issue. I feel like this is where these posts originate from, not wanting Germany to look bad.
Speaking of East Germany, what about Hoyerswerda 1991, where Germans then went on TV to boast about how their town was free of foreigners? A year later, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where all of the German residents stood there applauding while molotow cocktails were being thrown in the apartments of refugees. Most of the culprits weren’t even criminally persecuted in the first place, or they got away with fines and suspended sentences. The longest imprisonment of a neo-nazi related to these riots was three years. Cases against police officers, who were accused of not properly handling the riots and letting the neo-nazis be, were all dropped. Every single neo-nazi who tried to murder refugees 25 years ago is free. Later the same year, an arson attack in Mölln and in 1993, another arson attack in Solingen.
The aforementioned examples are just the ones that got at least some coverage by the media. Before 1990, victims of neo-nazi violence/murder were neither recorded by German state authorities nor the media, so the number of victims of right-wing violence since 1945 is greatly underreported. A list of the known cases can be found here. (This list includes two murders done by fascist Grey Wolves, one of a Turkish communist and one of a Turkish woman in a women’s legal advice centre; inb4 some Germ tries to make out some sort of argument out of this, implying that neo-nazis aren’t an issue at all in Germany.)
The “Germany is learning/learns/has learned from its mistakes” rhetoric as found in this post has been around since 1950, but all of this has happened nonetheless.
It’s always brought up in relation to anything happening in the US, implying something like Charlottesville couldn’t happen here anymore. Except that it does, so. Implying that neo-nazis don’t exist here doesn’t help anyone.
I used to think that posts like these were written by Germans who’ve legitimately never seen anyone experience racism in public (though I’m not sure if this is even possible) and therefore don’t actively intend to downplay anything, but ffs. How do you write about Charlottesville being “surreal”, when there’s been memorial marches in German cities around August 17th for the “deputy Führer” nazi criminal Rudolf Heß for 30 years.
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