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.
Shame for what is shameful may be conducive to self-correction, but the implicit premise must be, as with all things human, the health or betterment of the human concerned. There are many needs that humans have, and among the fundamentals are a basic sense of self-worth as well as security in the community which one is bonded to; this ought to entail active self-respect and some pride, but, at the very least, there must not be denial of things things, let alone active promotion of SHAME in them. People like Lea endorse this idea of such pity for others, and such denial of basic human nature, that she sees shame for things one’s great grandfather did as a good thing, yet does not explain what good this does for the person; what incentive they should have for sacrificing peace with oneself as innocent of such crimes, and belonging with his people. Pity and activism for strangers is considered something sacrosanct which precedes anything on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; what reason does a human-being have to be part of this activism, if you are telling them that SHAME is the cost? Not even shame at himself, but shame for his BLOOD? A person can be incentivised to care for others, and do give to others, but to expect that they regard their own being, just whose DNA they carry, as something they SHOULD feel ashamed for–how can you expect this? For most compassionate people, personal shame for things they have not done is a sure limit; to care for others is virtuous, but to denigrate oneself for things one can never change, just for the circumstances of one’s birth–anyone who wishes to cultivate any sense of inner peace must reject this.
Ultimately, every moral thing we do is for ourselves–not in a “selfish” way exactly, but the fulfilling of one’s conscience is for you, and there is nothing wrong with that. Compassion even for those we love is because we love them, because they represent something we cherish, and to see them harmed therefore harms something within ourselves; sacrifice of one’s health for another person is because love for them, or the need to live as one with honour, is regarded as more important than physical well-being. Not even religions which praise martyrdom actually want you to deny your whole self; they see that sacrifice for God means the fulfilment of one’s soul.
It used to be that all morality was seen as actively designed for one’s HONOUR; that dutifulness, sacrifice, charity, etc. was good because the moral agent cultivated inner peace by living as someone he wanted to be, someone he could respect. Yet you propose a moral system where the moral agent does not matter, and honour should even be dismantled. The mere principle of being nice to others, to you, means that one should accept and celebrate a life of SHAME. There is no society, no philosopher, no prophet, no psychologist, no one, who ever believed that virtue could be derived from a human by actively encouraging them to feel ASHAMED.
If you believe that there is a dichotomy between either being kind and progressive, and feeling ashamed for being German, then you must understand that you have no right to expect that of others. To people of healthy minds, this is deluded and sick; it gives the same feeling as someone who cuts themselves or is bulimic. Humans rightly reject being told be ashamed for things they have not done.
“At least we are educated about the crimes of the past which gives us the option to feel shameful for it” You say as you criticise Canada’s system. Do you understand why people might be suspicious of a system such as your own, and what it does for healthy development and self-respect in people, when you are there telling us how you have an aversion about even speaking your language in front of other people? Your system does not sound enviable to us.
The fact that you expect SHAME in people for things they did not do demonstrates that you are unfit to speak on anything which normal, healthy, functional, natural humans need and expect. It is also a modern sickness that you must even look at your nation as something which needs justifying, that your only counter to the bad is the feminism. Did you know that humans naturally care for their home and community for its own sake? Families, villages, nations; none until very recently in the West, have believed that pride in being themselves, basic comfort with being themselves, required being morally justified. Ironically, one of your great philosopher, Nietzsche, wrote much on this attitude; this denial of human nature, of just “being”, in favour of abstract progressive principles where the joys and emotional necessities of life, even one’s sense of self-preservation, are cast aside.
If you are this alienated from normal humanity, and so alienated from your nation that you believe its mere existence requires JUSTIFYING by appealing to 80s feminism (imagine an African tribe which looked for things they had done to justify themselves; rather than just saying “This is my people, my home, and I care for it–that’s it”) shows that you are the sort of person who could NEVER understand a sense of civic self-preservation, let alone the deep, spiritual need, to see one’s heritage preserved and continue to be loved by those who belong to it. On the refugee crisis then, as someone who advocates that your countrymen feel shame, how can you say you speak as any sort of person worth listening to? Your morality revolves around self-denial, rejecting basic human mental health, on promoting self-flagellation, and you are alienated from any sense of Germanness, so you could never know what it means to care about such a thing. When a German says they love their people, their traditions, their language, their humour, their expressions, their familiarity, their architecture, their landscape, and feel personally connected with their ancestors, you would answer all these healthy, fulfilling, unifying things by encouraging shame instead. So when they fear that such things might be lost or inherited by strangers, and be surrounded by people who are similarly alienated from them as you are, and do not care about those things, and even, like you, associate them primarily with historical evils, you must necessarily be apathetic to those concerns.
You turn morality into an inhuman tyrant rather than a tool for the well-being of the humans concerned. Virtue is about living a life of honour, and being a fuller human, and answering principle humans needs; self-respect and a sense of kinship are about the highest things human nature knows, and it makes no sense to promote a “value” which is antagonistic to these things. Values are only valuable in relation to the human value. To a human who needs to have self-respect and a stable and proud home and community, there is nothing valuable; all morality must be directed to those things.