Efficient Apologetics

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

It would be unfair to use the stereotype of Germans as orderly and efficient to describe them. Anyone who has had to transfer planes at Frankfurt Airport will know that the universal is not universal. Yet we discovered in Germany what we might call an orderly fervor for apologizing for what their ancestors have done.

Germany has always had a sinister sound to me. Growing up in a suburban LA Jewish neighborhood a decade after the end of the war, we were reminded of Germany’s actions a decade before. My parents, who fought in and worked the home front during the war, would never consider going to Germany or buying anything German: cars, appliances, even canned goods. My first trip there, a brief stop in Munich during a college age tour of Europe, left me constantly looking back over my shoulder for my parents’ disapproving stares. Even this trip, half a century later, the fact that I was going to GERMANY had an emotional filter over it that hasn’t appeared in any other country I have visited .

Incidents of German violence are legion. I won’t even begin with the first known historical atrocity, not known much beyond scholars of classics. In the battle of Teutenborg in 9 AD, the Roman legions were bested for the first time ever by fierce German warriors who stopped the legions in their tracks and proceeded to torture, murder, or enslave the prisoners they took. The Germans don’t apologize for that one any more.

But in more recent years—spanning the greater 20^th century—Germany was the world’s bad boys, starting 2 world wars, committing genocide on every Jew, Rom, gay, or political opponent they got their hands on. But that all came after the Germans had taken over large swaths of Africa, dominating and impoverishing local populations, and pillaging anything of value they could find. Then came the Soviet bloc and the Stasi secret police, the Berlin Wall, shooting anyone attempting to cross over.  The threat of nuclear annihilation over Berlin was a regular theme of my childhood. Under your desk and cover your head to protect against the blast. Even after reunification, the new German state has had its struggles over the treatment of floods of immigrants from the Global South.  

When Germany realized that some of their actions required apologies, they became, in caricatured fashion, efficiently apologetic. So, unlike the Polish erasure of their Jewish population that I experienced a month ago, the Germans have loudly announced their abhorrent actions in monuments and memorials. Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum detail the Gestapo’s torture practices during the Nazi era. Fragments of the wall are preserved for all to see. The Holocaust Memorial covers an entire city block in stark grey rectangular pillars. A Berlin Jewish Museum belatedly documents Jewish contributions to German culture. You know, folks like Einstein, Marx, Freud, Mendelssohn, Arendt, and various Rothschilds. Small plaques on walls and sidewalks detail the former homes of Jewish residents who were arrested and sent to concentration camps during those unspeakable years. The German government has been cooperative in the repatriation of artworks stolen by the Nazis to the descendant Jewish families.

Our recent trip to Berlin and Leipzig, for a professional paper to be given in the latter city, showed how much the Germans have taken to apologizing. After my experiences in Poland, it was welcome to see these acknowledgements. We did not seek out specific Jewish monuments in Germany and, unlike Poland, they weren’t highlighted as tourist attractions.

The Holocaust Memorial, half a block from the historic Brandenberg Gate, was impressive in its stark vastness. A grid of 2700 rectangular blocks covers almost 5 acres of precious urban space. A rough mental calculation determined there is a block for every 2000 Jews murdered by the Nazis. Wandering through this concrete forest, I imagined each as a Jewish community. Some small blocks barely above the surface were the few dozen Jews sent to the camps from small villages in Bulgaria or Belarus. The largest, over 15 feet tall, were the tangible remains of Warsaw or Kyiv or Babi Yar. And yet, the mere bulk of these thousands of blocks missed something:  absence. Those Jewish communities were gone, a negative. Perhaps it would have been better built down into the ground rather than reaching into the sky. That downward slash of polished black stone is what makes the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC so emotional. The soft drifting clouds of a lambent Berlin September day, visible through the towering blocks, undercut the message.

The vast scatter of blocks also led to inappropriate thoughts: what a Lego set! How often do they clean off the bird shit, which appeared on some pillars? When the blocks of the memorial, built in 2003, start to fall apart, how will they repair them? Cracks already appeared in some. I also wondered if the kids wandering through the grid would break into a game of hide and seek. The design was perfect for that. I’m sure the monument designers thought the responses they generated from visitors would be more sober than mine. A set of “beware of pickpockets” signs at the edges of the memorial are equally ironic.

More impactful was the Reichstag building. The vast grounds before the building are under reconstruction, but it was impossible to see that endless staircase and not flash on the 1930s newsreels of Hitler upon these same steps exhorting his faithful to massive responses of “Sieg heil!” and those raised arms in salute. This was where the holocaust was launched.

German apologetics were equally evident in the various museums we visited. The Humboldt Forum in Berlin and Grassi Ethnography Museum in Leipzig both had as main exhibits explorations of the appropriation and looting by 19^th century German soldiers, officials, curators, and collectors in their colonies in Africa. Benin bronzes, African masks, Mesoamerican vases, and Haida totem poles on display all contained confessionary labels on how the museum acquired them through acts of violence or unequal purchasing from local communities. The labels each contained frank admissions of guilt. Humboldt’s exhibits announced they were proud to be participants in repatriation of the bronzes to Nigeria. While we were there, the Grassi hosted a class of local high school students talking with an African-born curator about collaboration and indigenous rights.

In contrast, my neighbor Chris visited the British Museum this week and reported that the words “looting” and “repatriation” could not be found anywhere. “No remorse mentioned at all. Like…none,” Chris wrote. The British are efficiently non-apologetic.

So I return to the basic question I asked a few weeks ago as a performer in a festival in modern Auschwitz. How do we approach the children and grandchildren the agents of holocaust 75 years after the event? What is their culpability for what their great grandparents did? The reverse is found here: can we treat this very public apology to the world by the grandchildren of the masterminds of the holocaust, among other historical horrors, as making amends for murdering a mind boggling number of Jews, gays, Rom, dissidents, Africans, and looting their valuables? Will this honest, and efficient, apology prevent such an event from happening again?

Watching events in this fall’s United States and our politician’s threats to replicate some of the horrors perpetrated by Germany in the 20^th century—one conservative politician even boasting himself as being a Black Nazi—makes me wonder about the efficacy of German self-abasement.  

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