William E. Grim is a writer who lives in Germany. He is a native of Columbus, Ohio. He is not Jewish. According to Grim, anti-Semitism is alive and well in today's Deutchland. Due to the length of his article, I have divided it into two parts. Here is Part 1 of his observations on anti-Semitism in Germany:
"A Gentile's View of Today's Germany by William E. Grim
I'm not Jewish. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that happens to someone else. But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a street that until May of 1945 was named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in Munich, a pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement.
Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland) of "The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels." A few weeks later I'm at a business meeting with four young highly educated Germans who are polite, charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter changes to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils flair, their demeanors attain a threatening mien and one of them actually says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America is that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another one says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made famous by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my private meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up after a while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Maybe it's because I have blond hair and my last name is of German origin that the Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of them." It shows how much they understand what it means to be an American.
Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of these components:
(1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each other in World War II because the real enemy was Russia.
(2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during wars, and anyway, the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated by the American media, which is dominated by Jews.
(3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but even among the most highly intelligent Germans, even those with a near-native fluency in English, there is the widespread belief that the news network founded by Fidel Castro's friend Ted Turner, who was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda, is a hotbed of pro-Israeli propaganda.)
(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody i n Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.
(5) Ariel Sharon was worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis. America supports Israel only because Jews control the American government and media.
For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious of anti-Semitism. Sure, anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have the consequences been as devastating as in Germany. Looking at it as objectively as possible, 2002 was a banner year for anti-Semitism in Germany. Synagogues were firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, the No. 1 best-selling novel, Martin Walser's Death of a Critic, was a thinly-veiled roman a clef containing a vicious anti-Semitic attack on Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who was a survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz); the Free Democrat Party unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract Germany's sizeable Muslim minority; and German revisionist historians began to define German perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust not as crimes against humanity, but as early battles (with regrettable but understandable excesses) in the Cold War against communism.
The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything in public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed. How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 60 years without a Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the German way prevail amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living that is the envy of their European neighbors, and a constitution guaranteeing freedom for everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin?
What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite simple. While Germany no longer has the military power to enforce the racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of Nazism are officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is, the attitudes, world view and cultural assumptions - that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute the basic components of German identity. Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German psyche into its essential elements. External Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism, however, remains, and will always remain, a potential threat as long as there exists a political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.
Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly claim that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years 1933-1945. It is true that Germany today is much different than during the Third Reich. What is different is that due to its total defeat by the allies, Germany today is a client state of America and must do its bidding. That means repression of overt anti-Semitism. It's bad for business. The other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost World War II, he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological agenda. Germany, indeed virtually all of Europe, is essentially Judenfrei (free of Jews) today due to the efficiency and zeal of the Germans as they perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact, a very convincing case can be made that Nazism is one of the most success ful political programs of all time. It accomplished more of its goals in a shorter amount of time than any other comparable political movement and permanently changed the face and political structure of several continents."
Continued in Part 2.
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