Science Forums 2

[lemit]

For several weeks, I've been trying to decide how to introduce this thread. I have failed. The subject is so large and so important that it needs to be addressed constantly, by all of us, but I'm not sure how to do it.

I am an American of German descent, so I have some of the genetic responsibility and some of the genetic guilt for the Holocaust. In third-year college German, I discovered the post-war German authors and became caught up in their dilemna: how do you live with your sense of shame? How do you sleep, or eat, or breathe when you know you are part of a group that deprived many other groups of those privileges? (Yes, privileges is what you thought they were for those other groups, so that is what you must think they are for you.) And how do you make sure the world never forgets that you yourself are evil?

I must admit I found the postwar German authors appealing because they had the simplest, most direct style of writing I've ever seen, and German is a language that does not lend itself to a simple, direct style. I suppose a more modern cognizant of that simple, lean style would be Jim McKay's "They're all gone."

So what they were, and we are, trying not to forget is the actions of the World War II German government and people. There are a lot of other things people will try to throw onto this thread. Some of them will stick; some won't. Holocaust deniers can post on another thread I started: "Pseudoscience." Or they can go to the less formal blogosphere. They will be welcome there. People who don't understand why I make that limitation will be answered, briefly. I don't want the "Spacetime" syndrome here.

So, how do survivors (specially those who feel a sense of responsibility) live their lives without starting to deny that those things happened? What do we do to honor people like my German instructor, an Austrian Jewish judge who lost all his family and awoke screaming every night in an American college town in a fleabag hotel where he lived while teaching a bunch of spoiled Middle Class American kids? How do we live with ourselves? How do we atone for the devastation? How do we make sure the world doesn't forget?

And how do stop the continuing resonances of the smaller genocides, all of which are just as morally depraved?

--lemit