Introduction to our Travel Blog for May-June 2014. Written May 28^th 2014

This blog as I am writing it so far is very much a set of reactions to some of my experiences and to many of the places we are visiting.  I confess I never had an urge to travel to Germany, as I still held the German people responsible for the terrible genocide, and the massively, insanely destructive war that was perpetrated in their name, and for the madness that gripped them for a decade and a half from the early 1930s through the mid-1940s. This trip is teaching me a few things that I want to say right from the start:

-Human beings in general seem to be capable of doing terrible things to each other, of denying other people their humanity, of vicious cruelty and vicious apathy (as when we hear that bombs have exploded in some other country, that 400 people were killed or injured, and we continue eating our dinner as if nothing important has happened. Or worse, when we support policies that we know will result in OTHER people dying, not our own family members or our own citizens, and don’t care). The German people of the 1930s-40s are not alone in being complicit in great evil, or of apathy, or, what was probably more common, in great fear. The only difference between them and us is that their leaders during that time were madmen who created a government and policing apparatus that encouraged rule by bullies, thugs, and psychopaths.  Politics that encourage people to hatred, rage, the dehumanization of others, and irrationality will always give rise to, and power to, bullies.  It is much too easy to imagine our own country going down this same route. The groups being dehumanized may not be the same ones,  but the ugly results could too easily be the same. Whenever I hear a politician use an expression like "The REAL America," I shudder. The Nazis ruled that only "Real Germans" could vote, hold jobs, receive pensions earned, reproduce, and, ultimately, live. The first step in stripping others of their rights is deciding that their differences make them less than you.

-It is too easy for me to imagine what it was like to be a wife and mother, whose husband is away at war or possibly dead; whose teenaged son and elderly father have been called up to defend, at all costs, the city; whose younger children are—along with myself—traumatized by night and day bombing; whose home, neighborhood, and city are in smoldering ruins, with the smell of death everywhere; where basic utilities such as clean water, sewer, electricity, all communication technologies, have ceased to operate; where there is no food; whose government has completely collapsed, including all police systems; and where there are angry, vengeful enemy soldiers arriving who are raping and beating. Such a woman does not know if her young son and elderly father are alive, or are dying, or maybe she does know the worst. Such a woman knows that no matter how much she wants to lay her head down and die, she must feed her younger children and protect her daughters and herself as best she can.

For this woman, no matter how complicit she may have been in supporting, even enthusiastically, her despotic, insane, genocidal government, I can feel great pity, great sorrow, and affinity. I cannot focus anymore on holding her partially responsible, even if she was. I can only recognize her terror, her utter despair, and her courage in NOT laying her head down and dying. In the past I have only thought of the European survivors of German aggression and genocidal policies: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Brits, Danes, Dutch, Greeks; anywhere that was bombed, that saw reprisals, that had people rounded up. Now I can see the survivors, the children born into such a burning, destroyed world, as the same.

-I also realize in a deeper way than I did before the terrible cost to decency that reprisals must bring. It is one thing to think that, as an individual, one could risk certain torture and death if caught fighting, or even protesting, an evil system. It is quite a totally different thing to know that one could bring the same torture and death to one’s family, to one’s entire village, to neighbors, to strangers. So I have to ask myself if I would protest, knowing I would bring death or at least persecution down on others in reprisal. We will never know how many Germans (and French, Spanish, Slovaks, Croatians, Romanians, and Italians, to list most of the other complicit Fascist nations of the time) disagreed with and hated what was happening in their country, but lacked courage for themselves or could not bring themselves to cause reprisals for others. This goes for those living under Communism, as well.

-In traveling, as usual, one learns many new things (or one ought to), and some of the new things I have learned have been about even older wars, ones I have known little of. For example: the Thirty Years’ War (first half of the 1600s), which involved most of the countries of Europe, and resulted in the absolute devastation of much of Central Europe, in epidemics, in famines, in the denuding of natural environments, in the loss of almost half of all German males and the reduction of the populations of involved Central European nations on the order of 30-40%. Wikipedia says, re: the marauding armies of mercenary soldiers who caused much of the destruction, “The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.”

 Another example: The 7-Years War of the 1750s-1760s (known in the U.S. by the distinctly local name The French and Indian War), which was literally a World War, so much that it is called The First World War by historians. It was a war over empires,  and, again, quoting Wikipedia,  “It involved most of the great powers of the time and affected Europe, North America, Central America, the West African coast, India, and the Philippines………..The war was characterized in Europe by sieges and arson of towns as well as open battles involving extremely heavy losses; overall, some 900,000 to 1,400,000 people died.”

My point is that humanity—or at least the leadership of some countries—seems to go insane periodically; sometimes, when the “great powers” are sort of behaving rationally and not involved in terrible crimes against humanity, OTHER nations engage in orgies of brutality and/or genocide: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Serbia and Croatia, the Siege of Sarajevo. , etc, etc.

Recognizing this about humanity, I cannot continue to blame today’s Germany for its past. What I can do is remind us all of our tremendous responsibility in resisting the rage, irrationality of our own place and time, and the rise of bullies in the political and media spheres. Anytime bullies are glorified and empowered is a dangerous time.

So, I want to warn you that some of these posts are not fun to read, as they are my response to my surroundings, surroundings that for me are filled with emotional reactions of many sorts. The Third Reich and the Soviet-Communist era are too central to the history of most of the 20^th century to pretend they didn’t exist, or to ignore them when surrounded by reminders. I am personally hoping that by the time I have been here more than I have been so far (I am writing this on my ninth full day here), I will be ready to move on to new topics. I am sure most of you will be ready for that, as well. J