Matt McKeon
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2019
- Messages
- 1,096
- Reaction score
- 1,602
In this book Neiman compares how the Germans have remembered the Nazis and the Holocaust and Americans have remembered the Civil War and racism.
In most ways the events are impossibly different. The Nazis were in power for a brief 12 years, a tiny part of Germany's long history. The Holocaust, in Germany destroyed a community of Germans. German Jews were mostly very assimilated, roughly a third of German Jews were married to Gentile spouses, they had been equal citizens without de jure discrimination since the 19th century. Since the Nazis took power in 1933, that community was shattered: murdered, escaped or went into hiding. After 1945, many German Jews opted to go to other countries. Erich Marie Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front describes the groups of unhappy Jewish German emigres in New York, still German speaking, longing for home, but without a home to return to. The West German government organized a system of reparations, a complex, legalistic set of specific payments for specific types of losses, that seemed to depend on how good your lawyer was. Neiman describes it as Germany "protecting the brand" of being German.
Communist East Germany subsumed the racially motivated slaughter into a narrative of oppressed German workers and Soviet liberators. They preserved some of the camps in East Germany, but places like Ravensbruck or Buchenwald, horrible places, but not specifically tasked with murdering Jews. As staggering as Buchenwald's losses(56,000 male prisoners of which 11,000 were Jews), same amount of Jews were killed at Treblinka in a single, long day.
In most ways the events are impossibly different. The Nazis were in power for a brief 12 years, a tiny part of Germany's long history. The Holocaust, in Germany destroyed a community of Germans. German Jews were mostly very assimilated, roughly a third of German Jews were married to Gentile spouses, they had been equal citizens without de jure discrimination since the 19th century. Since the Nazis took power in 1933, that community was shattered: murdered, escaped or went into hiding. After 1945, many German Jews opted to go to other countries. Erich Marie Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front describes the groups of unhappy Jewish German emigres in New York, still German speaking, longing for home, but without a home to return to. The West German government organized a system of reparations, a complex, legalistic set of specific payments for specific types of losses, that seemed to depend on how good your lawyer was. Neiman describes it as Germany "protecting the brand" of being German.
Communist East Germany subsumed the racially motivated slaughter into a narrative of oppressed German workers and Soviet liberators. They preserved some of the camps in East Germany, but places like Ravensbruck or Buchenwald, horrible places, but not specifically tasked with murdering Jews. As staggering as Buchenwald's losses(56,000 male prisoners of which 11,000 were Jews), same amount of Jews were killed at Treblinka in a single, long day.