Shoes

Hall of Names 📽 Israel on the

Danube
📽 Hungary
Garden of Stones 📽 New York City

Stolperstein 📽 All over

Europe

Aschrott Fountain 📽 Kassel, Germany

 Wall of Names 📽 Paris, France

Memorial to Gay People Berlin

Persecuted Under Nazism Germany
Holocaust Memorial Schwerte, Germany
 Holocaust Memorial 📽 Berlin, Germany

Holocaust Memorial Pilsen, Czech Rep

LGBTQ Memorial Tel Aviv, Israel

A “Germans weren’t keen to dwell on the atrocities of the Nazi period, let alone to consider what portion of the blame - for the mass murder,
the torture, the forced labor - should fall on them. If evidence of the Holocaust couldn’t be razed, at least it needn’t be emphasized. And with
the erasure, a counternarrative rushed to fill the void. In the 1940s and 1950s, Germans were clear about who the war’s real victims were:
Who had suffered more than they had? Decades later, some of the children and grandchildren of the postwar generation would insist that
the nation own up to its deep shame.”
B “‘We are honored that you came,’ the men in the archive had told me. ‘And we are very sorry.’”
C “After 1945, there were no monuments to Nazis on their boulevards. The streets and squares named after HItler were rechristened within
a matter of weeks. It became illegal to brandish a swastika, the Nazi emblem. Holocaust denial is also now a crime; perhaps those in power
understood that a person’s refusal to accept such a core truth is itself a societal menace.”
D “It is at best crude and at worst immoral to compare traumas… But a person doesn’t need to debate comparative sin to measure comparative
redemption. The fact is that German culture is suffused with the terrible knowledge of what its citizens perpetrated. In America, amnesia prevails,
our textbooks and laws scrubbed of so much of what happened here… Redemption for people and nations depends on the same things: guilt and
atonement, remembering rather than erasing, and the presence of the past in preparing for the future.”
E “‘What Germans have done, which the United States has not done thus far as a nation is to be honest. We suffered but we have caused other
people to suffer more, and we have to face that. We cannot continue to cover up the crimes of our past. The fact that Germans didn’t do it
wholeheartedly at the beginning - that can be something that gives us hope.’” {interview with author Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans}
F “Americans had the Civil Rights Movement, but what Germans in their 20s and 30s did in the 1980s was different. The call for a reckoning did
not come from the victims. It came from the descendants of the perpetrators.”
G “It is a daunting proposition, but one well known to citizens and homeowners alike: A fresh coat of paint will not hide the rot in the basement.”

EXCERPTS FROM The German Model for America, Mattie Kahn, 10.05.2020, vox.com
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