Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  Banners like this are fine to fly in Berlin, yet many Germans are reticent to fly their own country’s flag. “You will only see flags during the World Cup,” Kordula told me. And it was true. During the much-revered global soccer competition (which occurred twice while we lived in Germany), everything was black, red, and gold: flags, shirts, Hawaiian-style leis of flowers; even the Berlin punks dyed their hair in the colors of the German flag. Then, a few days after the games ended, even when Germany won the championship in 2014, all the flags and colors disappeared again. While the far-right has started flag-waving again, most Germans today are uncomfortable with any sustained outward displays of patriotic pride, perhaps because of their history with disastrous nationalism, and how the outside world might view such displays.

  Yet the world at large has started to view Germany differently. In 2014, Germany knocked the United States out of its longtime position in the top spot as the most admired nation in the world, according to the Anholt-GfK Nation Brands Index. This was partly due to the World Cup win, but it also stemmed from the country’s rising position of power in the world. In 2016, U.S. News & World Report ranked countries on a variety of criteria, including openness to business, cultural influence, and quality of life. Again, Germany came out on top. Nevertheless, I found Germans to be more mildly amused by this than proud. Outright national pride was not an emotion I saw often in Germany, outside of the World Cup. In his satiric song “Be German,” comedian Jan Böhmermann aptly summed up the feeling that Germans today “are proud of not being proud.”

  Modern Germans have been brought up with the humbling weight of their country’s past. Even though most people today were not even born during the rise of Hitler, they still feel a sense of responsibility for what their culture did—and an obligation to the future. On his visits to classrooms of German students studying the Nazi years, Marcuse said one of the most striking things he witnessed was the reaction of the few students with an immigrant background in the class. “It was interesting to see how they felt it was part of their history,” Marcuse said. “They hadn’t grown up in Germany, and they were in their mid-teens, and still they felt, ‘This is part of my history and I’m reaping the legacy and the benefits of the Nazi period in a way. So I’m responsible too.’ ” This is the same sentiment Michael Moore captured on his film Where to Invade Next? when a brown-skinned teenager sitting in a German class claims his country’s past “because I’m German too.”

  The Germans I spoke with also expressed a similar sense of responsibility, even though all of them were born well after the end of World War II. Axel, a German actor whose youngest son went to kita with mine, felt that it was important not to dismiss the crimes of World War II as something belonging to the past: “Only when you say, ‘I’m German. It’s partly my fault. It’s part of me,’ then we can start to actually deal with it,” he said. At the same time, he acknowledged that it’s something that’s “very hard to get across when you talk to kids.”

  Ulrike Jureit, a German historian with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, told me that many consider Germany’s treatment of the past as exemplary. “Hardly any other country in the world has confronted its criminal past with such thoroughness and commitment—not only from political and criminal-justice standpoints but also in terms of collective cultural memory.” At the same time, she noted that critics see problematic aspects with the education around Nazism, including “a certain level of oversaturation” of the topic.

  I heard this sentiment, too, from Germans who felt the country’s Nazi past was almost overtaught, as a topic that was in every classroom and all around them. Still, I found no one who advocated for less instruction. “It’s better to talk too much than too little about what happened,” Annekatherin said, even though she was the one who had had to read The Wave three times.

  Jureit suggested that perhaps it’s time to place more focus on the Holocaust’s significance today. “We have spent decades investigating what happened during the Second World War, but now the question of what the Holocaust means for us and our current political, social, and economic challenges is becoming ever more prominent. What can we really learn from this time in history to help us shape our future?”

  It’s clear from the response to the Syrian refugee crisis that many Germans have already asked themselves such questions—and not just prominent leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel, but ordinary Germans. In 2015, when nearly a million refugees arrived in Germany, thousands of citizens came out to greet arriving trainloads of asylum seekers. When the surge of asylum seekers started, a survey by the broadcasting association ARD found that 88% of Germans were willing to donate to help the refugees, and 67% were willing to volunteer their time to help.

  This is not to say all Germans are welcoming and accepting of refugees—and in the wake of terror attacks and sexual assaults blamed on immigrants that support has eroded. The relatively new right-wing group AfD (Alternative for Germany) has ridden a wave of anti-immigrant feeling with its calls to tighten borders and a return to German nationalism. While the rise of the AfD is alarming, it is still not close to becoming a major political party. A large majority of Germans still reject any politics that appeal to prejudice. A January 2017 ARD poll found only 12 percent of voters supported the AfD. Instead most Germans were either still backing Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union party or the left SPD (Social Democratic Party) that has taken similar stances to the CDU on the refugee crisis.

  Even though right-wing, anti-immigrant populism seems to be triumphing in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many countries in Europe, Germany so far remains a steadfast, if somewhat lonely, champion of liberal democracy. The fact that the country has largely rejected politics based on prejudice has a lot to do with the keen awareness many average Germans have of their country’s historical crimes and their responsibility for them. As Peter Schriever, a German janitor, told The Washington Post in 2015: “We caused so much suffering many years ago during the war, when we invaded other nations and did many horrible things,” he said. “Now it is our time to heal those who suffer.”

  Historic Crimes and Responsibility

  We have our own myths in America. If I compare Germany’s approach to its past with my own education in U.S. history, it is easy to see a clear effort to portray America as always the hero with only cursory treatment of our country’s historical crimes. For example, I learned of the mass killing of Native Americans only within a narrative of “conquering the West.” I also remember a long lecture about the economics of slavery, the “triangle trade,” but no in-depth discussion about its inhumanity.

  History teaching has changed in the United States since I was in school, but it is still subject to a variety of political pressures. The way it’s taught also varies from state to state and even from one school board to another. Still, history education in general has moved away from the old style of teaching “names, dates, facts, and heroes,” according to James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. “We’ve moved toward understanding that the history of ideas is not just the ideas written down by a small group of people, but that history is written across a wide range of people within a society,” he said.

  That broader understanding opens up the study of U.S. history to more than the single narrative line, which troubles those who want to keep the idea of American exceptionalism as the main point of the story: the idea that the United States was (and remains) a model for the rest of the world. In 2014, Oklahoma state legislator Dan Fisher introduced a bill to ban U.S. advanced placement (AP) history courses, saying they focused too heavily on “what’s bad about America.” While that bill was eventually withdrawn, legislators in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas all made similar moves to modify or dump the course. Then a group that called itself the “National Association of Scholars” issued an open letter opposing the AP history framework developed by the College Board because it “downplays
American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”

  Part of the uproar was the misconception that the document in question was a full curriculum. Instead, it was a framework, a set of guidelines to help teachers prepare students for the AP test. School districts and teachers were left the task to populate it with actual content, so they were fairly free to include or exclude what they liked.

  Some of the language in the AP framework was eventually changed to satisfy the critics. Grossman said that while the changes were needed, they were relatively minor. The basic narrative remained, and the way history is taught will continue to evolve.

  “The challenge is to move from thinking of ourselves as teaching history to a view of ourselves as teaching students how to learn history,” Grossman said. Today, in many history classes, students are learning how to use the “tools of history,” which involves understanding historical context and examining evidence and how that evidence is used to make a historical narrative.

  My friend Carrie, a high school history teacher in a large Michigan district, has been part of that change in education style. “The big transformation in history is now there’s more emphasis on doing history and uncovering history in different ways,” she told me. Carrie now teaches in a very different way than she herself was taught. “There’s more primary source use, instead of the way it was before, which was ‘Here’s the textbook, read these pages, and you’ll have a quiz on those pages,’ and not a lot of discussion,” she said.

  Carrie felt it was important to provide the students with a number of different sources that bring a subject alive, then have the students debate and discuss it. She described the process of how she once taught her American students about the Holocaust, a topic that was framed around the issue of remembering historical atrocities. The students did a study of monuments around the world, visited a local Holocaust memorial, and heard a survivor speak. They looked into how the Holocaust was taught and remembered in Germany. They compared two famous books on the period: Night, by Elie Wiesel, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman. After the students had worked with all this information about the Holocaust, one of history’s worst atrocities, Carrie presented her students with a hypothetical situation about another real historical atrocity, slavery, asking them to debate if and how they would build a memorial to the victims of the slave trade in a fictional place in West Africa.

  Carrie’s teaching plan used numerous sources, gave many chances for discussion, and allowed the students to apply the concepts they had learned to a new situation. It sounded fabulous. Only she can’t do it anymore. Michigan has since revised its standards, which now limit her flexibility in terms of what she can teach and for how long.

  “I have less time to do things like that,” she said. “I couldn’t do it now because I wouldn’t have a week and a half or two weeks to focus just on the Holocaust. Those days are gone.”

  The Holocaust is still taught in Michigan, and the state recently mandated that every student learn about the Holocaust in World War II and the Armenian genocide that took place between 1915 and 1920. The law recommends six hours of instruction, not exactly the two weeks Carrie originally had, and nothing close to the coverage Germans give the topic, but it’s something. Carrie and her colleagues don’t shy away from American historical crimes, such as slavery or the Jim Crow laws. Those subjects are also mandated in the Michigan standards.

  Yet Michigan is a state with a fairly open approach to history. Not all states have come that far. Take, for example, Texas, whose State Board of Education passed regulations in 2010 on how the Civil War was to be taught, emphasizing “states’ rights” as the primary cause and designating slavery as a side issue. This decision and other controversial ones, like omitting any mention of the Jim Crow laws, have a large effect, because Texas, with its huge purchasing power, influences the content of many of the nation’s history textbooks. So any remaining “teach from the book” instructors out there will be giving their students a decidedly limited view of U.S. history—one that not only fails to come to terms with the crimes of the past but neglects to even mention them.

  This limited perspective on history education has consequences in the present day. As German historian Hans Heer once told the Telegraph, it’s essential to tell young Germans that “while you have no guilt, you must have a view. You must know what happened, and you have a responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  Jureit was hesitant to say that the United States should learn from the German example of teaching about their past. “Each society has to find its own path, to develop and maintain its own discussion formats, debate cultures, and constellations of conflict,” she told me. However, she did feel that it was crucial for democratic societies to always allow the widest possible range of opinions, even if they seem radical, ideological, or absurd. “There is no long-term benefit to suppressing those types of opinions; and in these types of debates, it’s more important to ensure that everyone is treated fairly, no matter how controversial or hard the discussion becomes.”

  Regardless, I can’t help wondering what our history education would look like if we followed the German example. What if our students were taught not only about slavery and Jim Crow but also about their responsibility for it? What if such historical crimes weren’t taught in just one class, but in several subjects, and we were reminded of slavery not just at one museum but in many and in our media and with memorials set in our sidewalks? It might change our current discussions around race relations today.

  What if we chose to erect monuments to the innocent victims of our wars? Not the soldiers, but the noncombatants—the women and children hit by napalm in Vietnam, or the ordinary citizens killed by atomic bombs in Japan. Wouldn’t it change our view of current and future wars?

  This is perhaps why some people are afraid to tell the negative sides of American history. Their children might reject them, as the Germans did their parents and grandparents. They might even refuse to go to war. If we did as Germans do, and refused to allow ourselves to escape the responsibility for our country’s past, we might change what it means to be American.

  As the descendent of German immigrants, I had never felt particularly proud of my heritage. This background wasn’t talked about all that much in our family. In 1985, U.S. President Ronald Reagan made an ill-advised visit to a German military cemetery in Bitburg, a visit he later defended by saying the soldiers buried there were “victims of Nazism just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps.” His statement buys right into the myth of German victimhood, seeking to somehow absolve even those who had willingly taken up arms for the Nazi cause.

  I remember reading an article about Reagan’s visit, and there listed among the names of the SS members buried was one Georg Zaske. Not a close relative for sure, but given my uncommon last name, probably somehow related. I was horrified. Never mind that he was only seventeen when he died. He’d signed up for one of the worst, murderous jobs a Nazi could do. This was not a relative I wanted to be associated with, and through most of my youth, I downplayed my German heritage, even denied it, saying at times that my family was Polish.

  And as an American, I could also rationalize away any personal responsibility for U.S. misdeeds. My ancestors arrived well after slavery had ended. The West had already been conquered and the land taken from the Native American tribes. For the most part, my relatives had lived in the North, not the South, so they took no part in Jim Crow.

  Now, after learning from today’s Germans, I will own my cultural heritage, all of it. As a German American, I have some connection to what my German relations did in the past. With that, I can also now take some pride—without being too proud, of course—to have heritage from a country that has owned its mistakes and is continually working to make sure they never happen again.

  Closer to home, I see now that if I claim to be American, I need also to claim all the things the United States has done wrong,
even before my time. I need to say, “I’m American. It’s partly my fault. It’s part of me.” My ancestors and I have benefited from stolen land, forced labor, and a number of historic crimes. As many Germans know, only when we accept this responsibility can we start to move forward to make changes for the better.

  Even more difficult, I have to talk to my children about these things, and about their responsibility as Americans. I didn’t have to wait until the United States established an entire culture of remembrance to do this. Berlin did it for me. One sunny spring day, Sophia, ever the one with the hard questions, hit me with this one:

  “Mom, I learned in lebenskunde that people haven’t been very nice to black people—they put them in chains and forced them onto ships?” She said that last part with a question in her voice, as if it was too outrageous to believe.

  This was the beginning of the conversation, one I found more difficult than any other talk. I took a deep breath. “So in America …”

  12

  Big Kids, Big Worries (Grosse Kinder, Grosse Sorgen)

  I arrived at Tine and Axel’s apartment in Prenzlauer Berg carrying bribes—homemade poppy seed cake and sweet bread from a nearby bakery. Tine met me at the door and invited me into the kitchen where Axel made us all cups of strong coffee. We sat together at a thick wooden table and got ready to discuss one of the most difficult subjects around: teenagers. They had two of them, and I had none, yet, so I asked them to share their insights. At one point, Axel mentioned that their eldest daughter, who was almost sixteen at the time, was usually gone the entire weekend.

  “She’s now pretty much allowed to do whatever she wants to do as long as she keeps us informed, and during the week, we want her to sleep at home,” he said.