My father is 96 years old and grew up in Nazi Germany in a small town called Bautzen. I did several hours of interviews with him about his experiences growing up, which I am turning into a book. This is what he said about Kristallnacht:
"I remember Kristallnacht. I was 11 years old. You heard that on this street a house burned down or that there are rambunctious people coming. There may have been five buildings vandalized in Bautzen. I saw a house with some damage, mainly windows broken. People were going in and out of the house. It did not seem significant at the time. They didn’t even talk about Kristallnacht in the paper. It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews. There was no specific graffiti on those vandalized houses. In a small town like Bautzen, there wasn’t much of a Kristallnacht but when you went to bigger cities there probably was. But I didn’t know about it at the time. I only realized the magnitude of it after the war.
What was more noticeable was Nazi propaganda. There were banners that read something like, “Jews are our misfortune.” There were signs on almost all shops indicating whether they were Jewish or not. Most of them were not Jewish. This was a big thing!"
> It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews.
This is one of the most fascinating parts of the Nazi rise to power to me. The sheer mundanity of it all. So many questions.
- what events today seem like ‘not a big deal’ but will go down in history like kristalnacht?
- Hitler is a byword for evil now, but at the time he was just another mundane talking head. We remember him as a frothing monster, but he was just a man, nothing special: Bavarian postmaster. Which talking head alive today will carry that legacy?
- Could it have been prevented? How do you stop the mundane effectively? Is it happening right now? Could we even tell?
Look out for anyone dehumanizing and demonizing whole groups of people, especially when it is people with political power doing that. That is the common thread, the one that allows entire populations to be conditioned to accept violence against groups of other people just because of ethnic or political differences.
Could it have been prevented at the time? I highly doubt it, what the nazis did was push to the extreme and industrialize what many European nations had been doing already for centuries. Socially the concept of universal human rights was still very recent and not widely accepted.
Yes we can tell, and it is happening right now, the warning signs are in plain sight. Look at the rise of right wing extremism in the United States, resulting in increasing numbers of terrorist attacks. It has been directly enabled by the language used in political discourse and what it has rendered permissible. Can it be prevented now from getting worse? Time will tell, but at least the election results from yesterday show that there is yet some hope. One should not be complacent though, the Nazis never achieved more than 30 some percent in open elections before they completely took over.
it's not about defining, it's about owning that the present is the way it is because of harms inflicted on certain groups. and, knowing that, perhaps finding ways to make amends so that the best ideals of the present can be applied to everyone. some groups still do not have opportunities or possibilities because of the ripples of the past.
to take your 1619 Project example. generational wealth has vast differences between black families and white families because of Jim Crow. as a society that supposedly prides itself on equal opportunity for all, we have not lived up to that and it creates a dissonance in the ways in which we say we hold certain ideals but act counter to those ideals.
since this is HN, if a CEO said one thing and behaved differently, you'd lose faith in that CEO. same thing applies to national image and national identity.
Extraordinarily brazen? It’s the unpleasant, difficult and uncomfortable truth which most Germans chose to ignore when it was happening, right after an end was out to it through the defeat of Germany and in the many years after it.
All previous achievements by Germans pale in comparison.
The only brazen thing about it - is how little punishment Germany has endured as the result.
Should’ve been much much much more punishment.
> punitive genocide being waged against them to this day
Against whom, the German people? The claim of “genocide” is not often used lightly. Do you have evidence of the systematic large-scale killings of German people occurring now?
> the Holocaust pales in comparison to what has been done to Germany
Since depravity has no formal metrics, I suppose that’s a value judgement. But it’s not one that’s shared by most people who are not themselves some brand of Nazi or Holocaust denier.
> I can only assume you have a horse in this race
There is no race except for the imaginary race fabricated by antisemites to sow doubt about the facts and causes of the Holocaust.
The ideology that punishment is a form of retribution, with the primary aim being to inflict as much suffering as the subject has earned through their crimes, rather than to produce a change in behaviour, is what leads to the US having the world's largest prison population and world's highest incarceration rate but having far more violence that other countries at a similar level of economic development and no significant decrease in violent crime.
It doesn't work on a nation-state level either - they tried the harsh punishment route after WW1 and it led to WW2.
17 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] thread"I remember Kristallnacht. I was 11 years old. You heard that on this street a house burned down or that there are rambunctious people coming. There may have been five buildings vandalized in Bautzen. I saw a house with some damage, mainly windows broken. People were going in and out of the house. It did not seem significant at the time. They didn’t even talk about Kristallnacht in the paper. It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews. There was no specific graffiti on those vandalized houses. In a small town like Bautzen, there wasn’t much of a Kristallnacht but when you went to bigger cities there probably was. But I didn’t know about it at the time. I only realized the magnitude of it after the war.
What was more noticeable was Nazi propaganda. There were banners that read something like, “Jews are our misfortune.” There were signs on almost all shops indicating whether they were Jewish or not. Most of them were not Jewish. This was a big thing!"
This is one of the most fascinating parts of the Nazi rise to power to me. The sheer mundanity of it all. So many questions.
- what events today seem like ‘not a big deal’ but will go down in history like kristalnacht?
- Hitler is a byword for evil now, but at the time he was just another mundane talking head. We remember him as a frothing monster, but he was just a man, nothing special: Bavarian postmaster. Which talking head alive today will carry that legacy?
- Could it have been prevented? How do you stop the mundane effectively? Is it happening right now? Could we even tell?
Could it have been prevented at the time? I highly doubt it, what the nazis did was push to the extreme and industrialize what many European nations had been doing already for centuries. Socially the concept of universal human rights was still very recent and not widely accepted.
Yes we can tell, and it is happening right now, the warning signs are in plain sight. Look at the rise of right wing extremism in the United States, resulting in increasing numbers of terrorist attacks. It has been directly enabled by the language used in political discourse and what it has rendered permissible. Can it be prevented now from getting worse? Time will tell, but at least the election results from yesterday show that there is yet some hope. One should not be complacent though, the Nazis never achieved more than 30 some percent in open elections before they completely took over.
to take your 1619 Project example. generational wealth has vast differences between black families and white families because of Jim Crow. as a society that supposedly prides itself on equal opportunity for all, we have not lived up to that and it creates a dissonance in the ways in which we say we hold certain ideals but act counter to those ideals.
since this is HN, if a CEO said one thing and behaved differently, you'd lose faith in that CEO. same thing applies to national image and national identity.
Against whom, the German people? The claim of “genocide” is not often used lightly. Do you have evidence of the systematic large-scale killings of German people occurring now?
> the Holocaust pales in comparison to what has been done to Germany
Since depravity has no formal metrics, I suppose that’s a value judgement. But it’s not one that’s shared by most people who are not themselves some brand of Nazi or Holocaust denier.
> I can only assume you have a horse in this race
There is no race except for the imaginary race fabricated by antisemites to sow doubt about the facts and causes of the Holocaust.
It's rather disturbing to see this stated with such conviction, but I guess Neo-Nazi's had to come from somewhere.
It doesn't work on a nation-state level either - they tried the harsh punishment route after WW1 and it led to WW2.