A German Lesson

Since I've been working on my thesis non-stop (18 pages of the first chapter, plus five pages of an introduction, plus two pages that exist but aren't connected anywhere, yet-- all written since last Tuesday) I decided to take a bit of break to write about... history.

So last time I talked about how there were at least two sides to every story. My next lesson in this concept came while I was studying abroad. During Spring Break several of my friends and I traveled first to Galway, Ireland, then to Munich, Germany. It was a seriously amazing week. From Irish donut-stand vendors drinking their second Guinness of the day at 10:00 in the morning, to rainbows over the Aran Islands, to a wonderful city walk of Munich seeing nearly every tourist site, a visit to the Teddy Bear museum, German coffee and cakes, and an extremely tasty Hofbrauhaus experience, I couldn't have had a better Spring Break.

One of our days in Germany, we four girls on the trip decided to take a day-trip to Garmisch, about a two or three hour train ride from Munich, while the boys did whatever it was they wanted to do that day. We had a great time-- it's a little Alpine city, with a chocolaterie, cute little shops, and beautiful views and walks. As we were exploring, we saw hidden up a hill a large, ornate building and farther below a playground where German mothers and fathers played on the swing-set with their kids. We decided to go up the hill to see what the building was.

It was a kind of church-- absolutely gorgeous-- and also a memorial chapel for World War II. Every available space on the walls of the building were covered with pictures of young men, most in uniform, some on tractors on their farms, or with their families. All had died during the war-- the oldest I saw was 24, the youngest 17. Hundreds upon hundreds of these pictures, all mounted on the walls of this empty, nearly hidden memorial. It felt incredibly sad.

Then I looked more closely at the young men-- all of the uniforms had swastikas.

Suddenly, I was confused about how to feel. These were the bad guys. These were the guys who had propagated the Holocaust. These were the guys that had shot at my grandpas. But in the pictures they looked so young, some no older than me at the time (I was 20). They were just boys. How many of them really understood what Nazism was, or what their government was doing? But they had to die; they had to be sacrificed in order to stop Hitler. If they were going to fight for him, there was no other choice but to stop them. And yet, they looked just like the pictures of American World War II soldiers, so young with so much life ahead of them. Especially the ones on the farms, standing next to their fathers.

From the memorial chapel, I could see the playground below, where German parents not much older than me supervised their toddlers. I thought about how different our conception of our family histories must be, and what they might say to their children about the past. For me, I am proud to say that both of my grandfathers fought in World War II. I know that they fought for freedom and for life and they prevailed. For the parents and children on the playground-- for all of Germany-- it's a time they have tried to forget, both on a social and even legal level (no German child is allowed to have the name Adolph).

I'm not sure I can even do justice to the immense confusion I felt when I realized what side the men in the pictures had fought for. Even now, I can't quite process my emotions in a cogent way. I know, of course, the history. WWII, at least to my mind, has a clear right and wrong. But still... how deeply sad. The shame of the past. The hundreds of young men. The infamy. Sometimes I still feel sad thinking of those pictures. For each one of them, somewhere there is an American, a British, a Free French boy who died, too, whose picture might be mounted somewhere. But their families can feel proud of them, without a second thought. There are many Jewish families carrying around pictures, too, who tell their stories with sadness, but without shame or guilt. There are the Austrians and the Poles, and many, many more. A thousand different sides to the story. A thousand different stories.