Our Generation Should Do What the Former Generation Failed to Do
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/germans/germans/shoulddo.html
A summary of the views of Jens Pieper, the 24 year-old editor of Nobody Asked Us, a recent book written by a group of young "third generation" Germans who are students at Humboldt University. It represents this third generation's thinking on how the Holocaust should be confronted and remembered and why they have declared their distance from how their parents' and grandparents' generations have dealt with the Holocaust. This summary was written by Peter Rigny, associate producer of this FRONTLINE film, "A Jew Among the Germans." It is drawn from Rigny's discussions with Jens Pieper.
• The second generation of Germans has not overcome the taboo of talking about the Holocaust, despite the '68 student movement and its rightful attacks on former Nazis still in high positions in the German federal government. This holds a great danger for the future.
• If it is still taboo to talk about the meaning of the Holocaust, its central importance to German and human society cannot be conveyed to future generations which will no longer have direct contact with eyewitnesses to the Holocaust.
• Our generation should do what the former generation failed to do: to tackle the Holocaust on a personal, emotional basis, to allow on an individual level the sentiments of moral responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich, even though none of us (the generation of our parents and our generation) has committed any of these crimes.
• We are sufficiently informed about the facts of the Holocaust, but we are critical of our schoolteachers (as primary "informers") for failing to convey to us (or perhaps they were psychologically unable to do so) the level of meaning of the Holocaust that could be of use today and in the future when direct contact with eyewitnesses will no longer be possible.
• The second generation of Germans, our parents, pass on to us their message about the Holocaust in an imposing manner, i.e. without allowing any questions or responses or criticism from their children. They want to cement the message as it is seen by them, and in this way they declare us dependent, minor, underage. And yet "they" expect us to actively come to our own understanding about the Holocaust. This is self-contradictory, we say.
• We are not totally sure what we are searching for, but we know that the Holocaust still has a central importance to us. And one thing we know is that the second generation's message may simply not be working today in a more individualistic society where some of us are descendants of both survivors and perpetrators/bystanders.
• It could well be that, in the end, we arrive at the same fundamental meaning of the Holocaust as did the preceding generation. However, today, the way this must happen is by each individual understanding the Holocaust through a personal quest -- not triggered by a forced confrontation with pictures from Auschwitz but from an education that makes us understand that Germans carry a particular responsibility because of a horrible past.
• We are conscious that this might involve the risk that some young people do not get the message. However, the other way -- to force a ready-made meaning of the Holocaust onto generations that will soon not have direct contact with eyewitnesses -- runs the greater risk of forgetting the Holocaust altogether. The new message must be based on one's own understanding, on making personal connections to one's own questions and own concerns about morality, ethics, the human condition.
• The second generation says that all of what we deem necessary has already been achieved by them. We disagree.
• The few Jews who chose to live in the GDR [Communist East Germany] in the years after the war were convinced communists. They did not only downplay their Jewish identity, but helped the government to downplay (if not negate) the Jewish character of the Holocaust. In the GDR, the Holocaust was part of a communist and anti-fascist narrative of class struggle which made all Holocaust victims into anti-fascists. The fact that they were Jewish was only of very secondary importance. Up until the later years of the GDR, the government, for the most part, avoided mention of Jewish topics and all Jewish aspects of the Holocaust were integrated into the anti-fascist ideological rhetoric.
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How to Make Fun of Nazis
By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
New York Times - AUG. 17, 2017
For decades, Wunsiedel, a German town near the Czech border, has struggled with a parade of unwanted visitors. It was the original burial place of one of Adolf Hitler’s deputies, a man named Rudolf Hess. And every year, to residents’ chagrin, neo-Nazis marched to his grave site. The town had staged counterdemonstrations to dissuade these pilgrims. In 2011 it had exhumed Hess’s body and even removed his grave stone. But undeterred, the neo-Nazis returned. So in 2014, the town tried a different tactic: humorous subversion.
The campaign, called Rechts Gegen Rechts — the Right Against the Right — turned the march into Germany’s “most involuntary walkathon.” For every meter the neo-Nazis marched, local residents and businesses pledged to donate 10 euros (then equivalent to about $12.50) to a program that helps people leave right-wing extremist groups, called EXIT Deutschland.
They turned the march into a mock sporting event. Someone stenciled onto the street “start,” a halfway mark and a finish line, as if it were a race. Colorful signs with silly slogans festooned the route. “If only the Führer knew!” read one. “Mein Mampf!” (my munch) read another that hung over a table of bananas. A sign at the end of the route thanked the marchers for their contribution to the anti-Nazi cause — €10,000 (close to $12,000). And someone showered the marchers with rainbow confetti at the finish line.
The approach has spread to several other German towns and one in Sweden (where it was billed as Nazis Against Nazis).
This week, following the violence in Charlottesville, Va., Wunsiedel has come back into the news. Experts in nonviolent protest say it could serve as a model for Americans alarmed by the resurgent white supremacist movement who are looking for an effective way to respond (and who might otherwise be tempted to meet violence with violence). Those I spoke with appreciated the sentiment of the antifa, or anti- fascist, demonstrators who showed up in Charlottesville, members of an anti-racist group with militant and anarchist roots who are willing to fight people they consider fascists. “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”
The problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy.
Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit. And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,” Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.
Most important perhaps, violence is just not as effective as nonviolence. In their 2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Dr. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examined how struggles are won. They found that in over 320 conflicts between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as violent resistance in achieving change. And nonviolent struggles were resolved much sooner than violent ones.
The main reason, Dr. Stephan explained to me, was that nonviolent struggles attracted more allies more quickly. Violent struggles, on the other hand, often repelled people and dragged on for years.
Their findings highlight what we probably already intuit about protest: It’s a performance not just for the people you may be protesting against but also for everyone else who may be persuaded to join your side.
Take the American civil rights movement. Part of what moved the country toward the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the images, broadcast to the entire country, of steadfastly nonviolent protesters, including women and occasionally children, being beaten, hosed and abused by white policemen and mobs.
Those images also highlight two points emphasized by Stephanie Van Hook, the executive director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. First, nonviolence is a discipline, and as with any discipline, you need to practice to master it. Nonviolence training was a fixture of the movement. Even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his companions rehearsed in basements, role playing and insulting one another to prepare for what was to come.
And second, sometimes being on the receiving end of violence is the whole point. That’s how you expose the hypocrisy and rot you’re struggling against. They attack unprovoked. You don’t counterattack. You’re hurt. The world sees. Hearts change. It takes tremendous courage: Your body ends up being the canvas that bears the evidence of the violence you’re fighting against.
But ideally, of course, we’d avoid violence altogether. This is where the sort of planning on display at Wunsiedel is key. Humor is a particularly powerful tool — to avoid escalation, to highlight the absurdity of absurd positions and to deflate the puffery that, to the weak-minded at any rate, might resemble heroic purpose.
Germany is not America. For one, neo-Nazis aren’t allowed to carry assault rifles through the streets there, let alone display swastikas. But we do have similar examples of humor being used to counteract fascists in the United States. In 2012, a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., was met with counter-protesters dressed as clowns. They held signs reading “wife power” and threw “white flour” into the air.
“The message from us is, ‘You look silly,’ ” a coordinator told the local news channel. “We’re dressed like clowns, and you’re the ones that look funny.”
By undercutting the gravitas white supremacists are trying to accrue, humorous counter-protests may blunt the events’ usefulness for recruitment. Brawling with
bandanna-clad antifas may seem romantic to some disaffected young men, but being mocked by clowns? Probably not so much.
Which brings us to Charlottesville, and the far right rallies that will surely follow. To those wondering how to respond, Dr. Stephan says that “nonviolent movements succeed because they invite mass participation.” Humor can do that; violence less so.
The broader issue, in her view, is this: Why do oppressive regimes and movements invest so much in fomenting violence? (Think of our president and his talent for dividing the country and generating chaos.) Because violence and discord help their cause. So why would you, she asks, “do what the oppressor wants you to do?”
This article was updated to reflect news developments.
An earlier version of this essay misstated Rudolf Hess’s ties to the town of Wunsiedel. He was only buried there; he was not born there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/how-to-make-fun-of-nazis.html?mcubz=0
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LGBTQ People: Germany's long-forgotten victims of the Nazis
Marcel Fürstenau
Deutsche Welle 01/27/2023January 27, 2023
Gays, lesbians, and other LGBTQ minorities were ignored for decades in the public commemoration of those persecuted and murdered. But the silence is over.
"Now you're a gay pig and you've lost your balls." That was how Otto Giering was taunted by a guard in August 1939 after his forced castration in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Even before his deportation to the concentration camp, the 22-year-old had been convicted twice for homosexual contact and sent to a labor camp.
The harrowing story of the Hamburg-born journeyman tailor can be read in the book "Medicine and Crime," published by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, to which the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial and museum belongs.
Otto Giering survived the ordeals, but his health was ruined: "Due to the concentration camp imprisonment he had heart problems, stomach problems, suffered from headaches and migraines," the book recounts.
Later, his application for compensation was rejected, and he did not come home for days and was reported missing. "The police found him confused and disoriented," the book says.
Otto Giering died in 1976, a few months before his 60th birthday. He was one of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men who were deported to German concentration camps by the end of the Nazi era in 1945. In Sachsenhausen alone, there were about 1,000, more than in any other concentration camp. Along with Jews, Sinti and Roma, they were those most abused by the guards.
Gay men murdered
Gay men, forced to wear a pink triangle badge on their prisoner clothing, were often put into punishment "commandos" with tougher working conditions. This included work in the so-called "Klinkerwerk" — a subcamp of Sachsenhausen where, among other things, they were forced to manufacture armaments.
In 1942, 200 gay people were systematically murdered at this site, and the deaths of more than 600 gay prisoners were recorded in the concentration camp north of Berlin. Although the fate of gay men during the Nazi era had been documented many times, it took decades for marks of public remembrance to appear. There was no plaque commemorating gay victims of the Nazis at the Sachenhausen memorial until after the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s.
Late remembrance and rehabilitation
The first attempts to commemorate gay men persecuted in Sachsenhausen had already been made earlier when the concentration camp lay in East Germany. Memorial spokesman Horst Seferens told DW that members of the West Berlin gay movement laid wreaths with pink ribbons, which were immediately removed by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).
"In the meantime, this group of victims, which has been represented on the advisory board of our foundation since 1993, is present in many ways in the exhibitions and in the other work of the memorial," Seferens emphasized.
There are several reasons for the late start of official remembrance and moral rehabilitation: On the one hand, this is related to the fact that practiced homosexuality was considered a criminal offense in both German states after 1945, although liberalization began much earlier in East Germany than in West Germany.
Seferens, noted differences between East and West in commemorating the victims of the Nazis. "In the GDR, in line with anti-fascist state doctrine, it was the political prisoners who were in focus," he said. And in the Federal Republic, it was the military officers who plotted against Hitler and later the Jewish people who were commemorated, he explained.
"For decades, many other victim groups — those persecuted as "anti-socials," Sinti and Roma and gay people – were excluded from commemorations and denied financial compensation. "This sheds light on continuities of stigmatization and exclusion mechanisms that extend far beyond 1945," said Seferens.
Homosexuality was illegal long before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, as was set down in paragraph 175 of the Reich Penal Code of 1871, the year the first German Reich was founded. "Unnatural fornication" between men fell under this paragraph, defined as "crimes against morality." The Nazis massively tightened the penal provisions and introduced Paragraph 175a in 1935 prohibiting all "lewd acts" between men.
Lesbian women were also denounced for their "deviant" sexuality and came under police scrutiny, but in terms of criminal law, they were mostly spared. The situation was different only in Austria, which joined Nazi Germany in 1938, and where there was no legal distinction between male and female homosexuality.
Overall, the fate of lesbian concentration camp inmates is much less researched than that of gay men, as there was no separate inmate category for them. Lesbian women were sent to concentration camps under various labels: As "anti-socials," homeless, prostitutes, or women categorized as having an "immoral lifestyle."
The pressure of persecution was constantly increased, especially on men. Immediately after taking power in 1933, the Nazis shut down all gay and lesbian subculture venues and disbanded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1918.
The Nazis' hatred of Hirschfeld, a pioneer of the gay movement, was only compounded by his Jewish faith. In 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, the Nazis founded the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion." Gay people in particular were targeted for persecution after the office gathered data on citizens. Around 100,000 investigative proceedings were initiated during the Nazi era, and about 50,000 men were convicted.
Not rehabilitated until 2002
Even after the Nazi regime ended, Paragraph 175 remained in force in both the Federal Republic and the GDR. It was not finally abolished until 1994, four years after reunification, and it took until 2002 for the German Bundestag to rehabilitate those convicted by Nazi judges. Most of them had already died by then.
As it has done every year since 1996, the German Bundestag is commemorating all victims of Nazi rule on January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year's anniversary focuses on the LGBTQ community, exactly 90 years after the Nazis came to power.
This article was originally written in German.