A Couple Thoughts On History In Germany (W/ Phunny Photos)

Sorry my Hamburg update is taking so long. One little part of it kind of turned into a post all its own--an actual sort of an essay, as it turned out, rather than just a photo-driven chronological narrative. Don’t worry, there will be a photo-driven chronological narratives for my Hamburg trip. Just try not to get too bored reading this. I will include some stray photos (w/captions) to keep things interesting.

Mr. Chaps, that's my name, that name again, is Mr. Chaps

(Note: my subject matter here is pretty heavy [German attitudes towards WWII & the Holocaust] and all of my photos are kind of ridiculous. Sorry for any incongruence, no disrespect is intended.)

Hamburg, like Berlin, is obsessed with its history.

Unlike Berlin, Hamburg is not so hung up on the “horrific groundbreaking genocide/biggest war of all time/incredibly traumatic 20 year separation” stuff from the last century or so. Hamburgers are more into the “huge ancient harbor/Gateway to the World” angle. This can be seen in the city official name, plastered on everything public, The Free (as in it was a free city in the Holy Roman Empire) and Hanseatic (as in it was a member of the Hanseatic League) City of Hamburg. Hamburg was a very important city in the Nazi regime, and it was bombed just as flat as Berlin, but while reading the city’s many plaques I found way more references to a major fire in 1842 than to the, uh, complete destruction by high explosives and subsequent invasion and occupation by hostile troops that happened about a hundred years later.

Someone was really enamored of this butt-head stencil. I found them all over the place.

I read an article in the New Yorker (this is just an abstract, ya need a subscription to read the whole thing) a couple months back that compared attitudes towards military history in Berlin with those in Dresden. I’m obviously simplifying a very complex societal process here but here’s the gist as I read it: Dresden, very famously destroyed via firebombs, isolated for decades from free Western media, casts itself as a victim, an innocent gem of European high culture butchered by the barbarous Allies.

No, I have not started smoking.

Most of pre-war Dresden has been rebuilt, brick for brick, and polished to a high gloss, as if the war never happened; Berliners liken it to Disneyland. The city has a glut of smiles and fine porcelain, but few physical reminders of or remorse for very active participation in a dreadful, violent dictatorship, and the Holocaust. This is shocking, and unsettling, and utterly alien to Berlin. This city is the absolute center of German guilt—I walk by three memorials to Nazi victims on my way to school, four on my usual jogging route, and whenever I go exploring I usually find a couple new ones. A Berliner introduction basically goes as follows: “Hi I’m Rolf, I can never make up for World War II.” For every ancient building that gets painstakingly reconstructed, 10 totally new, often strange and angular structures spring up.

Crazily offensive "Throw The Ball In The Ethnic Stereotype's Mouth" game at this carnival I stumbled upon. Please note the craggy, brooding German carny in the foreground.

Berlin is the capital of what Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdung, a very nice German term that I will poorly translate into “distancing,” or “alienation,” or “estrangement,” with an emphasis on “strange.” Berliners never tries to hide or deny the horrific things their fathers did. Embracing that kind of horror is shatteringly difficult, so Berliners just do it as hard as they can; they constantly acknowledge this strange, dark, alien aspect of their culture—of themselves—and do their best to keep designing doorknobs and loving their kids.

Smorkin' Labbit, man. 10 inch. This was in a glass case at a subway station. Your guess is as good as mine.

This kind of self-estrangement and pathological openness is stressful and exhausting and never-ending. Berlin kind of treasures its guilt, works passionately to never forget how awful it is. As the physical center of Nazi rule, it doesn’t have much of a choice. The monuments needed to be built here—if this was the spot where elected officials decided to start the systematic elimination of the disabled, a memorial of some kind is compulsory. Things aren’t so simple for other cities. A community-wide selective blindness, a general buckling under tremendous social pressure—this kind of complicit guilt is harder to acknowledge and memorialize (and much easier to forget) than concrete, official decisions and actions. On top of this, Berlin went through 20 years at the center of worldwide politics, and no city, much less the epicenter of a world-shaking massacre, could get through that kind of media saturation without some serious and prolonged self-scrutiny.

The Germans always do this crap: multiply the price by some number and then put it on the sign, as if you are getting some sort of deal by buying in bulk. Not only does it ignore the good ol Law of Demand, it is kind of insulting and dumb. Yes, I know: one half times six equals three. Oh man, I wonder if they'll let me buy 12 for 6?

But not every German city—as in no other German city—fell under the same weight of guilt as Berlin, and in cities where so many other wonderful things have been happening for so long, the 1930s and 40s are less of an overwhelming force and other parts of history come to the fore.

Is that okay? Is it allowed? There’s a balance here that’s impossible to strike in a way that pleases everyone. On the one hand, focusing on any point in history besides the you-know-what feels not just wrong and deeply disrespectful, but vaguely dangerous—without doublethink, forced forgetfulness and denial, the massive bureaucratic system of the Holocaust never could have functioned. Any effort to let go, to think about anything else, can feel like a slide back toward that repressive, sinister mindset. On the other hand, a lot of other interesting, important things have happened in Germany, and it can feel unfair to let all that other history be absolutely canceled out forever by a couple of really awful decades. In my casual wanderings in Hamburg I found a few war memorials, and nothing about the Holocaust--I'm certain there are plenty of monuments, but they weren't thrust upon me as in Berlin. Hamburg has centuries of history, of people and buildings and events, and I never got the feeling that the city was whitewashing or denying anything.

This is an awesome truck. I have nothing else to say in this matter.

Aaaaaaand whole entire libraries have been written on this subject, and I’m just one uninformed American who hasn’t even taken a class or read one proper book about it. I’m going to Dresden later this month. I’ll let you know how it goes.