Germany, 1945: it still hurts.
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, says the German people should stop hating themselves (https://x.com/brittpettibone/status/1883259366557581348).
Musk seems to be worried, these days, about distinctive national cultures dying out. After a trip to Germany, he concluded that Germans were “conditioned” to blame their country for World War II and hate themselves for it. Is that why the German government does nothing while illegal Muslim immigrants swarm across Germany’s borders?
I don’t know. Half of my family is German. My aunts visited the Germans, and they came over and visited us, when I was a boy. There didn’t seem to be any animosity lingering from World War II. German was sometimes spoken in Grandpa’s house… and occasionally in our own, by my mother.
But we grew up as Americans. It was as simple as that.
Germany had a very rough 20th Century–World War I, World War II, the Cold War (remember the Berlin Wall?)–and healing comes slowly.
Let’s see if Musk can do anything to help.
Few people alive in Germany today are likely to have been involved in the atrocities of WW II, and the masterminds of this mayhem have died out. It was a terrible scar on that nation, but there were many in Germany who did not back that regime, even at the height of it all. While I agree that the German people should not hate themselves over these events, the lessons should never be forgotten.
I’ve never been to Germany before, but I have heard firsthand how true Berlin natives are a minority today in their own city. All the Germans I have known are very loud, talkative types who think they are right about everything – not being prejudice just sharing my personal experience. P.S. Martin Luther is one of my heroes.
That description applies to some of my German family members–but by no means all.