UPDATED: OCT 10, 2007

 “LETTER FROM GERMANY”                                               

I recently had the fortunate experience of being able to compete in the annual Age-Group Triathlon World Championships.  This year they were held in Hamburg, Germany.  For those of you who don’t know, and ours is not the most widely known sport in the country, triathlon is a distance race in which swimming, cycling, and running are done consecutively.  Your race time is the total amount of time that you take, including the amount of time you spend between the legs of the race, changing clothing and equipment.  One of the great things about our sport is that it is open to all and while there are certainly fast people in it, the primary objective for most of us is simply to cross the finish line, happily and healthily.  Because the competitions are organized by five-year age groups, and because at my age (70) the age-group nationally is small and getting smaller, I have qualified for Team USA at our National Championships three times over the past four years. 

That this year’s race was in Hamburg had a special meaning for me beyond just getting to the Worlds again.  As many of you know I am Jewish.  I grew up in a household where my Dad did the research for the first book that proved that the notorious anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery.  (Unfortunately it is still widely circulated by contemporary anti-Semites, and not only those in certain Arab countries.)  It was actually created by the Russian Czarist secret police in the 19^th century.  My Dad was also part of the group of American Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople who during World War II vainly tried to convince the anti-Semitic Arabists in the State Department that there was a Holocaust going on.  Personally, while my last ancestor arrived in the United States in 1892 so I didn’t lose any relatives that I knew in the Holocaust, I knew that I had lost relatives that I didn’t know. 

So for many years after the war “Germany” was a big thing for me.  Although my mother bought me a Rolleicord (a junior Rolleiflex) camera, made in Germany, in 1950; that was because it was the best of its type and I was an avid young photographer who liked its double-lens-reflex format.  But we would never own a Volkswagen and going to Germany was out of the question.  After all, it was “The Germans” who did this, and they were all Nazis, weren’t they?   

I started getting educated on this point when in the 1970s I developed my first friendship with a non-Jewish German who had actually grown up during the Nazi era.  It was then that I first began to gain my understanding of the role that the internal terror against German, not Jewish, citizens played in the triumph of Nazism.  If you had a neighbor, and many Germans did, who expressed anti-Hitler views even in casual conversation, without ever acting upon them, who one day disappeared and never came back, or did come back having suffered unspeakable torture at the hands of the Gestapo and never uttered a political word again, you were not too likely to utter any yourself either, much less try to do anything against the Hitlerian Regime. 

Certainly there were many Germans who were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis.  But they never got more than 37% of the vote in a free election before they took power in 1933.  As I began to read more about the period just before and just after the Nazi takeover, I came to a much better appreciation of just how the Nazi horror did come to Germany (about which I have written numerous times on the pages).  Until Hitler actually took power on January 30 of that year, it came with apparent constitutionalism, it came with a muting of the propaganda against the Jews, it came bit-by-bit, it came in like Carl Sandburg’s Chicago fog did, “on little cat feet.”  (Sound familiar?)  So my view of Germany started to change, bit-by-bit.   

However, I didn’t make my first trip there until 1997, and on that one I was just passing through.  On my way to a business meeting in the Austrian Alps I arrived first at Frankfurt.  I remember going into a corner of the terminal while I was waiting for my connection to Munich and having a little cry.  Landing at Munich, I then drove to Austria.  I did pass through a sleepy, leafy village called Dachau (the site of one of the first Nazi concentration camps, for German prisoners, which later became an extermination camp).  That gave me a bit of a jolt, and my first live experience with Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase describing Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Israel: “the banality of evil.” 

My next trip was to the world-famous Frankfurt “Buchmesse,” the world’s largest book fair, courtesy of my primary academic publisher who exhibited there every year.  It was there that I heard a speech by Joschka Fischer, the then-Foreign Minister of Germany.  Each year there is a “guest country” at the Buchmesse.  That year it happened to be Poland.  Herr Fischer spent the first third of his speech extolling the centuries-old cultural relationships between Germany and Poland.  The second third was devoted to an extensive apology, with no excuses, to Poland for the German-Nazi invasion and the rape of that country that occurred during World War II.  And the last third was devoted to an extensive apology for the Holocaust, the major brunt of which happened to have been borne by the 3,000,000 Polish Jews who were murdered under its mandate.  He made an explicit point of saying that modern Germany totally rejected Nazi policy and Nazi actions.  During the speech I recalled the formal apology to the world on behalf of his country issued in 1995 by President Roman Herzog of the German Republic for the German role in the war in general and in the Holocaust in particular.   

Coming from a country where there has never been a full, formal governmental apology either to the African-Americans for slavery or to the Native Americans for their decimation and destruction of their culture and way of life, I was especially impressed by these events.  Since Frankfurt, the country’s financial center, is, even in the eyes of most Germans, not “Germany,” I was then ready for a more extensive trip there.  Thus when I was able to qualify to go to the Worlds at Hamburg I was most pleased.  And I saw more than just Hamburg, Germany’s second city.  After the race I was also able to spend four days in Berlin with my fellow TPJ columnist Michael Faulkner, a retired lecturer in modern world history and an expert on modern German history.   

And so, some impressions.  The most important one is that Germany is a country that has clearly not only turned its back on its Nazi past but has also consciously rejected it.  Are there neo-Nazis there?  Yes, just like there are here.  But they are highly marginalized.  Unlike “our” neo-Nazis, they share no major political planks such as virulent anti-immigrationism, which is stock-in-trade of both their neo-Nazis and ours, with one of the two major political parties on the country.  Much more importantly, Holocaust Denial is illegal there, as is display of the swastika, and Neo-Nazi websites cannot operate in Germany.   

Much more important, there are no memorials to the Wehrmacht (although our very own Pat Buchanan did think that it would have been a good idea for his favorite President Ronald Reagan to have visited the cemetery at Bitburg where numbers of SS men are buried).  On the other hand, there are many memorials large and small to the German resistance to the Nazis, as well as museums celebrating the resisters (a major one of these is in Berlin).  There is a major, large, and very striking Holocaust Memorial right in the center of Berlin.  There are a number of Jewish museums in various parts of the country.  It is what the Nazis did to Germany as well as to the rest of Europe that is remembered, and rejected; it is the anti-Nazis who are memorialized. 

Germany is clean, neat, and for the most part the very plentiful trains run on time (although unlike in Japan, you cannot set your watch by them).  Hamburg is a beautiful, leafy, green city with many waterways, completely recovered from the devastation created by three-day February, 1943 Hamburg Raid of incendiaries, aimed by the British Air General Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris specifically at the civilian population, which killed 55,000 of them.  Berlin is alive and vibrant and once again Germany’s cultural center.  Having been reunited only in 1990, it is still in a sense rebuilding, although in most parts that process has been completed.  But most importantly, Germany is a country that looks ahead, that rejects its Nazi past, that like its fellow European countries, wants peace and has no territorial ambitions beyond its borders.  In fact, it struck me when I was there in particular (and I have been fortunate enough to have visited most of the countries in Europe at one time or another) that in the foreseeable future there is no prospect of war on the European continent, unless it is brought to them from the outside (as it might be, for example, as a result of a Georgite attack on Iran).  I am very happy that I had the opportunity to visit there, and I look forward to my next trip.

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