Hans & Sophie Scholl Str.

When we were in Germany, it was always in this provincial hamlet. I like the word town, so I don’t want to mix it in with something I hate. Most people there were either guest workers paid a pittance, or their grandparents had made it there after the war. I’m not kidding when I say that all the Nazis who didn’t have enough money to make it to South America ended up there. Most had come from behind the Iron Curtain, so they saw themselves as Germans, and raised their offspring that way. Their hard, rolling Rs always gave them away, but being German was the hill they would die on their favorite colors – white, red, and black – blazing. 

To say I have a problem with Germany would be a gross understatement. The hamlet was most certainly not a good ambassador to the country in how it liked to present itself to the world (welcoming, deeply sorry about the crimes that had been committed, contrite, trying to make amends). I can safely say that out of around 100 teachers I must have had when there, three were really open about building bridges in general (regardless of where someone came from), three honestly didn’t care, and the rest of them had varying degrees of white superiority affiliation that some managed to suppress better than others. Being exposed to all that had one positive aspect to it, I became really good at anticipating and sussing out micro-aggressions. Especially when coming from Germans. There are a few Germans I would consider friends (some even very close friends), but for the most part – based on my experience growing up – the safest way to deal with them is through cautious communication. Prove yourself to me, show me you’re neither a bleeding heart nor a Nazi, and I might be able to trust you. 

People give me a hard time when I say that, but many years later in college I was validated. I was doing a few modules on Germany (as part of my degree work, which aimed to analyze national identity in Weimar Berlin and of course throughout the Nazi regime. A visiting professor was telling the class how every town in Germany had a street named after resistance fighters Hans and Sophie Scholl. I rolled my eyes, which he couldn’t see, and mumbled, “where I lived that was the smallest, most hidden street,” which he definitely did. He was in the age group of those whose parents had been in the SS, the ones who had allegedly had to deal with those facts throughout their teenage years, in the ‘60s, and even though I did like him as a teacher and a person, he was still a German. 

Without missing a beat, he asked me to repeat what I’d said then announced to the class that “this is how you can see to what extent a town still had Nazis in it, by the size of the street.”

I knew I could trust him then. 

This isn’t about being vindicated. Up until that point, I’d honestly never heard a German point this out so blatantly and matter-of-factly. It soothed my soul, it really did, and when a week or so later a German girl from my course and I ended up on the same bus, I invited her to our place where we sat in the kitchen drinking tea and eating cookies, and she told me – after I’d told her of my heritage and sentiments towards Germans –  that while her grandfather had been in the SS, to her he had always been grandpa and “you can imagine how livid he was when my mom named me Sarah.” I heard her, I really did, because that was the conversation I’d always wanted: honest, bringing our feelings to the table so we could deal with them properly, becoming friends so we could honestly build something new.