My struggle with my German heritage and how moving abroad has impacted that journey
Lea Krusemeyer (she/her) // Staff Writer
Liza Borissova (she/her) // Illustrator
It is 2014 and Germany just won the soccer world championship. I am 15 years old and my friends are outside celebrating with thousands of others. They do not understand why I hesitate to join and I do not understand why they do not. Standing in a crowd of Germans, surrounded by flags and the chanting of our national anthem reminds me too much of the darkest time in my country’s history. In German we have a word for this struggle, “Erbschuld,” which essentially means hereditary guilt that is passed down from generation to generation.
Now, one might argue that I was not even born at the time of Adolf Hitler’s reign over my country, therefore I have no business feeling ashamed of the past. I have tried many times to convince myself of this truth.
There is no possible way to deny the actions of the past, because in Germany they are present at every corner. You cannot walk to the supermarket without coming across what we call “Stolpersteine,” little engraved golden bricks in the sidewalks that have names and dates of victims of Nazi Germany. Every person I know had to take at least one field trip to a concentration camp during their time in school — the fact that there are multiple to choose from should speak for itself — and most people I know have a connection to at least one person who still shares the disgusting beliefs of the past.
My personal breaking point was on my own field trip to the concentration camp “Sachsenhausen.” My class and I were in the middle of a guided tour through the buildings, and while we were walking past a wall that was used to line up prisoners and shoot them, it happened. One of my classmates stopped and spat on the ground in disgust. I’m talking about a 16 year old person here, someone who was definitely old enough to understand the actions of the past. That was the moment I decided that I could never be proud of being German because the mindset of the past is very obviously living on in the present. I took disliking my own country as far as leaving it at the first possible moment. I left at 19 to come to Canada, which is where I experienced cultural diversity for the first time in my life.
It was at that point that I became undeniably aware of the differences in heritage pride. While I would hesitate to share that I am German, most of my friends would proudly say that they are Mexican, Filipino or Indian. They would hang their country’s flags as decorations in their homes and build friend groups with people from their own countries. Meanwhile, I had never owned a German flag in my life and I tried to avoid meeting Germans here as much as I could. For me, this seemed to be the only way of escaping a shame that was too heavy to carry for one single person — the shame of coming from a country riddled with hate and genocide so unimaginably cruel that the world will never forget.
Now that I have been away from Germany for a while, my mindset is slowly beginning to shift. After seeing my friends gaining power and strength from their own heritage and embracing the cultures and countries they are from, I am slowly beginning to try and do the same. It is a whirlwind of emotions and it might be a journey that takes my entire lifetime, but it is also a growing opportunity I wasn’t aware I needed. It was very German of me to see the world in a set of boxes and believe that there are only two sides to every story.
Through conversations with friends and through the simple fact that I am educating myself and growing older, I realized that it is indeed possible to condemn the actions of the past while also embracing the actions of the present. Maybe Germany is not the worst place to call home, and only seeing the negative is not fair to a country that has done a lot to change over the last 70 years.