one more reaction to >>Why do they hate us?<<
a) how do you know they hate you
b) who's they?
c) who is you?
As a kid I somehow (unintentionally, nothing virulent) imbued the picture of Germans (Schwaben in a denigrating way) as warmongers, with Wehrmacht helms and Schmeissers, burning the villages, shooting hostages etc etc.
At the same time my good father bought us Spiegel every monday - those were FJS times, and Augstein got locked up etc - and there was a different kind of Germany offering itself.
Not that I would feel the cognitive dissonance. It just exploded one day into my face: I was in Stuttgart on PostDoc, staying with a Fischer family (divorced, with two daughters). It was just the time of Filbinger uproar - the governor of Baden Würtemberg was a military judge during the war and let 18-years old boys hang for desertion, date April 15th 1945. The way he tried to wiggle out of his shameful history, made me grimace. When I tested the waters in this respect with Frau Fischer, her answer was sort of an earthquake for me:"This man is a swine". How could eine Schwabin (Stuttgart is the capital of Suebians) think so about another Schwab!? Are they not all the same kind of "warmongers, with Wehrmacht helms and Schmeissers, burning the villages, shooting hostages" blah blah blah
Today I can say, I pity those poor bastards with helms and schmeissers, still cant fathom a few of them (see Auschwitz), see all kinds of a*holes around me... And a lot of simply normal, straightforward people. And I like quite a few of them - thank God, otherwise it would be tough -.
I can assure you, CB, everybody could - given a chance - experience this kind of shift in his or her perceptions. |
