I DON’T LIKE THE SOUND OF THIS:

I have to admit that it is a strange experience to watch a Holocaust film in Germany. It’s even stranger when you’re the only American in the midst of about 200 Germans. But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to watch the reactions of the Germans as the events of the movie unfold. You hear a lot about how Germans are so ashamed today of the behavior of their countrymen during the Nazi period and about how much they’ve done to atone for their past sins. Don’t buy that bill of goods. If the audience of the screening I attended is any indication of German attitudes in general, it doesn’t augur well for the future. Remember, this wasn’t an audience composed of skinheads from the neo-Nazi enclaves in Karlsruhe and the former DDR. This was a group of Germany’s best and brightest: educated, middle class, sophisticated denizens of a major cosmopolitan city.

One scene in particular is seared into my consciousness. It happens about halfway into the film. The Jews of Warsaw have been herded into the Ghetto. A street used by the Germans bisects the Ghetto. While a group of Jews is waiting to cross to the other side of the street, several Nazi thugs force some elderly Jews to dance at an increasingly faster tempo. Weakened by malnutrition, hobbling on crutches, riddled with heart and lung infirmities, many of the Jews fall to the ground in sheer agony. It’s a sickening scene. It’s the kind of scene that makes you ashamed that your last name is Grim. Hell, it’s the kind of scene that makes you ashamed that you listen to Beethoven. If an American soldier had done the same to a German or Jap POW he would have been thrown into the brig for life or cashiered out of the service on a Section 8. But there they were, today’s educated, freedom-loving, let’s-all-hold-hands-and-love-one-another Germans, laughing at torture.

If there is a more sickening spectacle than Germans finding humor in what their fathers and grandfathers did to the Jews, if there is a more perfect example of the utter lack if humanity at the core of the German nation, I am unaware of it. There is something terribly wrong with Germany and the German Volk.

Read the whole thing, and hope he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Howard Veit says the article that this comes from is bogus, and sends this link to a denunciation of the author. On the other hand, reader Barbara Skolaut emails:

You end your post with “and hope he’s wrong.” Sorry, he’s not. I lived in Germany from 1970 to 1973 (I worked for the U.S. Army part of that time, and for a German family the other part), and a favorite saying among the Americans was “scratch a German, find a Nazi.”

I think Grim is on to something at the end of his essay, where he says “the Germans are ashamed because they got their rear ends handed back to them by a bunch of Yanks, Russkies and Brits who they considered-and still consider- to be members of inferior races.” When I lived there, 25 years after the war had ended (and we had helped them rebuild into a prosperous country), there were still a few boarded-up, bombed-out buildings in Frankfurt am Main (and I’m sure in other cities as well), reminding them that they had lost. We were told to remember that we were there as guests, but I have no doubt a great many Germans (particularly the chattering classes) still saw us – and see us even today – as occupiers, even as we were keeping them from having to speak Russian. I loved living there, and loved my trips back (though I guess it will be a while before I give them any more of my money), but I never had any illusions. . . I hope we move what bases we still need in Europe to Poland and Hungary. We don’t need the grief.

Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rebecca Shaechter sends this:

I’m currently studying abroad in Germany, and have been here in Bavaria for over 8 months. I have to say that my experience with the Germans has been a LOT different than what was described in Grim’s piece. People here are deeply ashamed of the Holocaust. I have a German last name and speak German pretty fluently, so I’ve been able to get an “insider’s opinion” on a lot of these issues. The thing I hear most is that people are horrified by what happened to the Jews in Germany, are horrified that their country could commit such crimes. When I was back in the States I found a study on the opinions of German youth versus American youth (18-25yrs). One of the questions on the survey was “Are you proud of your country?” Something like 90% of the Americans answered yes, and only 25% of the Germans did so. I guess what I’m trying to say is that from my experience here, it seems like people in my age group at least are profoundly aware of the atrocities that their country/people committed during WWII. They are ashamed and do not want this to happen again.

That said, I haven’t seen “The Pianist” yet, and it will be interesting to see the reaction in the theater and compare it to that of Grim’s. I’m hoping his was a fluke.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Ken Century emails:

I too was shocked upon reading the Grim article several months ago. That is to say, I was shocked because I found it to be so incredibly unbelievable. I am a Jew who lived and worked in Germany from the summer of 1994 to the summer of 1995, and have traveled there no fewer times than twice per year since then. I am also quite fluent in German, have many acquaintances and very good friends there. I am also the type to strike of casual conversations with those around me, and the opportunity to do so presents itself much more readily in Germany with their practice of sharing tables with others. (Something quite pleasant to an extrovert like me!) In all of my time there, I have never hidden the fact that I am Jewish, and in fact it could be said that it was quite often the centerpiece of many of the political and religious discussions that I had there (over a beer), oftentimes with complete strangers. In fact, I just returned from Germany on Friday, and was also there for Bush’s ultimatum, landing here in the U.S. literally hours before the bombs began to fall.

My experiences there tend to reflect very closely those of your other reader Rebecca Shaechter. The knowledge of the Holocaust is much more deep there than here in the United States, and I concur with her that most people there share a deep shame of what happened in their shared past. . . .

All that said, I do feel that while Germany has done a good job memorializing the Holocaust, and that such memorialization has produced a deep common thread within the hearts and minds of its people, I’m not sure that the end effect was entirely all positive. As one can well imagine, many of my recent discussions with friends, acquaintances, and strangers there have revolved around the War on Terrorism and the War in Iraq. What they seem to have collectively learned from their horrible past is a deep sense of pacifism, which while commendable on many fronts, leaves them a bit like a deer in the headlights when confronted with real arguments regarding the U.N., EU, and the general state of world affairs, but more particularly the possibility that “evil” still exists in the world.

I don’t have recent firsthand experience. I remember earnest lectures on racism in the United States — which I found risible even at the age of 9 — from students and faculty at Heidelberg when we lived there in my childhood, but I haven’t spent any real time in Germany since, and certainly nothing that would give me any ability to judge whether Grim’s story rings true. It seems, however, that there’s reason to doubt it. Certainly this reader does:

As another guy with a German last name who lived in Germany, I don’t buy the story by Grim. I was stationed in Germany from 1989 to 1992, patrolled the Intra-German Border, witnessed the opening of the border fence, and got drunk with plenty of Germans. (I also had many visits to Germany to various cities where my US Army uncle was stationed.) Though we soldiers mostly associated with other soldiers, I had some German friends. None were close to the people Grim describes. In my years there, I met one–and only one– German who frightened me. She was a young woman who wanted to know what my grandfathers had done in WWII. She then told me about her grandfather, who drove trucks full of people to Dachau. She initiated the conversation, then angrily defended him saying, “What was he supposed to do? It was his job.” I thought–there is a Nazi. She was a frightening person, but she stands out because she was the only person like that. My landlord was a good-hearted man, who had been an artillery sergeant on the Russian front, wounded a few times. He would not talk about his experience, just sort of stared and said, “It was bad. Bad.”

There is cultural embarassment, and perhaps some defensiveness with people who don’t want to feel the shame of what previous generations have done. One German officer was a liaison to the US Army Armor School. He told my class of officers that he had done nothing, wasn’t alive in WWII, so had nothing to feel guilty about. He was a mouthy idiot, but did not seem anti-Semitic or a believer in a master race. Just a jerk who wanted to move past the collective guilt.

I would be very interested to see a Holocaust film in Germany. But I doubt the reaction would be that described by Grim.

The mail just keeps coming. Paul Music emails:

My sister-in-law lives in Germany, teaches English as a second language, and Bible Studies, in German.

She speaks perfect German, and many are surprised to find out that she’s American, not German. Her experiences, as a white Christian American, are much closer to Grim’s than Shaechter’s or Century’s.

That’s a bummer to hear.

FINAL UPDATE: Okay, I’ve gotten a lot more mail and the consensus is that this story is bogus. I’ve generally found John Hawkins’ site, where this appeared, reliable, but nobody’s perfect. On the other hand, it’s the growth of European antisemitism that makes stories like this believable now, and that growth is, sadly, indisputable.