You’ve read the post title and are thinking “Oh Heavens, what’s he going to say?”
Occasionally, I go to conservative chat blogs and try to keep my debating skills honed by being the moderate, or as I sometimes get called the “Godless-pinko-commie-Jew-hating-EUnuch-faggot”. If I take exactly the same position in left-wing chat blogs I’m a “Fanatical-Christian/Zionist Imperialist/capitalist militaristic crypto-fascist”. As you may have gathered there’s often very little debate at many of these places and lots of cyber-shouting and it’s very irritating when a halfway-rational discussion gets overtaken by the screaming loons.
Anyway, at a recent debate, people were (rationally) talking about anti-Semitism in present-day Europe (esp. France and Germany) and I typed out that “In all the time I’ve lived here I’ve never seen any evidence of real anti-Semitism in Germany”. I didn’t press the send button and bring down a torrent of ridicule upon me, because I have visited Sachsenhausen and when I worked in Munich (where housing is in very high demand) I refused to take a very nice apartment on the grounds that it was in Landkreis Dachau. But the very fact that my mind would automatically come up with the sentence after living here as opposed to what some people were saying who didn’t live here and maybe thought the History Channel dealt in current affairs, tells you just about all you need to know about the Germany in which I have the pleasure of living.
If I mention that I was in the Union of Jewish Students when I was at University, many people here become embarrassingly apologetic and I have to point out that as they’re only 25 years old the Holocaust really wasn’t their fault, and I aren’t Jewish, and if a German politician made a verbal slip on a par to that which I almost typed, the words “political wilderness” would be in widespread use.
I just wanted to say it. I’ve still got an old UJS card, I walk around wearing t-shirts with Hebrew script on them and I’ve never seen any evidence of anti-Semitism that is less than 60 years old”. I know there have been some “incidents”, especially in Eastern Germany, but “harmless” negative remarks about “Jews” are tolerated here less than almpst anywhere I know.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if I’m either absurdly naive or part of a great Zionist conspiracy despite having a frenulum. Or maybe just that, hard as it is to believe, Germans really are decent people.
I have encountered a bit of it. Leftovers taught to the children of war children. “Harmless” comments here and there that would never be spoken to an actual jew, yet continue to perpetuate a thought/idea. It bothered me.
jen: Maybe it’s because I first came to a liberal, student town and had a student card with a star of david on it….. On the other hand I do get annoyed by the way Israel is reported about in the Geman media. Can’t tell if it’s my or their bias though……
We considered an apartment in Dachau itself (not just Landkreis) and decided against it. A big part of it was that I just knew my American family and friends would NEVER understand.
I don’t know about the anti-semitism; I wasn’t really adept enough at German to understand nuances that might have been anti-semitic. What I found was that most Germans of my acquaintance didn’t know diddly about Jews. No idea what Hanukkah was or anything else. Even growing up in the southern US (where Jews are quite rare) I knew way more about Judaism (and way more Jews).
Susie: Same reason here and I certainly didn’t want the word “Dachau” printed on all my documentation - registering my car there and then driving it to the UK with Dachau plates? I think not.
Generally: I wrote this post last year and have posted it over from the old site. I would have put it in its proper place in the archives, but I wanted to write smething positive about Germans and, due to a certain incident speaking with one German, I couldn’t, hence this recycled had to do.