What Germany can teach America about confronting history

[marmar]

What Germany can teach America about confronting history

James Rosen
Published 8:45 a.m. ET July 8, 2020 | Updated 10:30 a.m. ET July 8, 2020


(Detroit Free Press) In 1975, a friend and I left college — David at the University of Michigan, me at Kalamazoo College — after our sophomore years and went to Europe. Now it’s called a gap year; then we were labeled dropouts.

We found jobs on a U.S. military intelligence base in Munich — David as a dishwasher, me as a bartender. I would stay in Germany for nine months. David fell in love with a German woman, moved in with her, and lived there for a decade.

David and I grew up in Oak Park when almost all of its 40,000 residents were Jewish. Many of our friends’ parents had emigrated from Europe, and some had survived Nazi concentration camps. The parents of my best friend Harry had met at Auschwitz, a massive complex in southern Poland. They were among the 7,000 skeletal survivors liberated by Allied troops in January 1945.

.....(snip).....

For more than a century after the Civil War, the Confederate flag flew over Southern states that saw most of the country’s 4,743 lynchings between 1882 and 1968, some executed by mobs that included mayors and sheriffs and police chiefs murdering under cover of white hoods.

Only when the last Confederate flag falls can the United States claim that it has come to final terms with an evil part of its past. .............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2020/07/08/history-germany-nazis-america-confederacy/5389066002/

[70sEraVet]

1. This article needs to be read in its entirety

A very moving, personal story. And paints a very clear contrast:
"In today’s Germany, the 12-year Nazi period is certainly part of the country’s heritage. But there is not an ounce of pride in that heritage, only regret and reproach.

Across a vast national landscape with 83 million inhabitants, not a single Nazi monument stands."