Wow. I’m thinking back to the 5 years I lived in West Berlin as a young adult. I was in the US Air Force, and for the first couple weeks after I arrived I lived on Tempelhof Central Airport, which had been converted from a Nazi-era temple of German ethnic supremacy to a US military base.
Even after I moved off base, work took me to Tempelhof at least a couple times a week.
Much of the civilian workforce there was German. Sometimes young German friends would come with me to the base to party at a club.
Everyone knew the building, the largest in the world before the Pentagon was built, had been commissioned by Hitler himself and operated during the war as a tool of hatred and brutality.
Sometimes being inside the building felt eerie, but for the most part we took it for granted because we knew our history and we dealt with it. The German people have done an extraordinary job of facing up to the facts of history. They teach facts unflinchingly to their children knowing that to do so is the only way to ensure a better future.
Some of my friends told me that they occasionally felt anguish knowing their grandparents had cooperated with or had even been part of the Nazi regime. When I lived there, some of those grandparents were still alive sitting at the dinner table when I visited.
Do you know what my friends did not do? They did not try to pretend the Nazi era had not happened. They did not try to pretend brutality against Jews and other ethnic minorities did not happen. When my friend’s children were born, they taught them just like they had been taught, anguish notwithstanding.
There is no reason on Earth why we cannot do the same with our children with respect to our brutal history of slavery. There’s just no reason.
Do you know what the Germans never do? They never erect statues of Nazi leaders or in any other way glorify the era.
The fact we still do that with Confederate leaders, the fact that removing statues is intensely controversial right now, shows us how far we have to go, and how very misguided these so-called critical race theory bans are. What they really are is an attempt to avoid facing up to real history.
We should learn from the Germans.
