http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bombing-of-Hamburg-in-World-War-II
All these monuments, certainly make me ponder what the world would be like today if Americans had had to daily face on their TV screens and in their daily experience critiques of the wars of our fathers (and mothers), for example of the Vietnam War or of the Filipino Occupation.
Why doesn’t most every city memorialize victims of crimes and war which Americans have been involved in dating at least back to the U.S. Civil War?If I look at American TV, even the number of critical documentaries dissecting U.S. wars in Central America, the Middle East and in East Asia over the last 50 years are not shown on TV very much anymore. (There are a growing number of websites, though. See my NOTES section below for more on this very topic by clicking on links.)
http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol2no2/re-wars.html
Sure, I might find in the U.S.A. a few TV channels, like the History Channel or a few public broadcasting stations, playing documentaries and leading discussions, but most Americans don’t have their nose shoved into criminal home country history like many in Germany have had as a living and growing up experience on a daily basis all of their lives—i.e. monuments or Stolpersteine in the street, articles in the press, or in commercial and public media on at least a weekly basis
NOTE: On the one hand, this constant barrage of news of and from the past leaves some German youth quite disaffected and sometimes even hardened. It is emblematic of Germany that when the Martin Niemoller Society sponsored the discussion of the few famous Germans who opposed Hitler and his War in early February, not a person in the Wiesbaden County Court hall discussion room was under the age of 40 years. (Of course, university exams were being taken the following week.) On the other hand, despite the fact that many youth feel this focus on the past is overdone, most know quite a bit more about their nation’s past than do Americans as a whole.
JIM JONES’ STORY IN GERMAN--& Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Then on Saturday night recently, for a change of pace, I was surprised to come across one German channel, ZDF-TV, showing the 2006 documentary Jonestown: Life and Death of the People’s Temple.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762111/
This Stanley Nelson documentary on the People’s Temple and Jim Jones is insightful and places the concepts of (a) suicide, (b) victimhood, and (c) the role of peer pressure as well as (d) the power of crazy or misguided charismatic leader in an entirely new American context.
However, these four concepts are assuredly well-known in Germany.
That is, for German historians, modern educators, and students, the story of Jim Jones and the Rise and Fall of the People’s Temple is not all that foreign as one reviews the 12 nasty years under Hitler ideology, a period of new nation building of modern man and society or if one looks at either the story of East Germany under the Communists through the end of WWII through 1989. (One might even look at the popularity of Che Gueverra and the rise of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, too, to see that terrorism and revolution still find sympathetic ears in Germany—as is the case in America—when it comes to war or for fighting for justice.)
It was fascinating to watch this translated (into German) documentary and relearn or retrace the phases in the idyllic Rise and Suicide of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple Community, i.e. in the language of the evil Hitler (who was actually an Austrian.)
As Jim Jones spoke about love and building a new society in America or on Earth (in German), I could imagine Hitler doing the same thing in his own way, i.e. Hitler and his Nazi cohorts created some of the same imagery of building a better and more modern society, especially as the charismatic Hitler and his henchmen had bonded with the Germanic peoples so well by playing on the theme of idealized love of/for any German to his country or his motherland--or tradition of the fatherland and its growing identity as a people and nation..
For many Germans in the 1930s, following a horrible period in their history in the wake of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles, love of family and love of one’s society became the dominant national dream.
That same Nazi German leadership, in turn, gave (non-Jewish) German citizens not only positive dreams and ideals—but physical gifts, such as national work projects, roads, sports-centers, and even family beach resorts (for the masses).
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