I went to see *Der Untergang* today. (IMDB:0363163) It is based on the memories of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary. Last year there was a long documentary – basically a very long interview – with her. (IMDB:0311320 The film starts and ends with a quote from the documentary, and you actually see her speaking in the last shot. I think she died shortly after the documentary was released. These last words are what impressed me the most: Even when she heard about the six million Jews that were murderered, she somehow felt innocent. She didn’t know about it! Until one day she passed a memorial for Sophie Scholl of the Weisse Rose. Sophie Scholl was killed when Traudl Junge started working for Hitler. And she realized right there that being young is not an excuse. Being ignorant is not an excuse. There are ways of learning more about the world around you. And when one day the time has come, you shall not say that you were too young, that you didn’t know. This lesson applied then, and it applies now.
It is one of the major reasons I am interested in politics, in immigration laws, in tearing down the Fortress Europe. Because if one day my children look me in the eye and ask me, What did you do!? I don’t want to say that I didn’t know about it. I don’t want to say that I didn’t do anything about it.
If you let others do the dirty work, sending the refugees back, turning them in, letting them rock in the prisons until they can be sent back, letting them drown in the sea when they try to reach their promised land, then you’re like the meat-eater that cannot kill an animal. You pay others to kill for you where you can’t see it.
The second world war is close to home. My grandfather fought in it. He never said much; he worked behind the front lines, securing communications and all that. Or so I heard. I remember how he told me he was always glad to be an American prisoner of war, and not a Russian prisoner of war. For not many of those came back after the war.
There are also other relatives. One great-grandfather came back from Colombia where he owned a farm when Hitler called for all Germans to return to their homeland. Having married a non-aryan was a minus, however, and so his love for Hitler was not returned. He was wounded in the war and deserted towards the end. I don’t remember much else.
Strange how it was not long ago, strange how it involved my own family, and yet it seems so remote. And then a movie suddenly shows the images of shelling, of death, of kids dying, of women dying, of thousands of wounded rotting in bunkers, of old people, abandoned, of crazy lunatic leaders in their bunkers, of lies told, of death sown, and reaped.
And yet we dare insult people from Ex-Yugoslavia; here in Switzerland, when the initiative to facilitate naturalization of 2nd and 3rd generation foreigners in Switzerland was lost, there was a lot of talk about people from Ex-Yugoslavia. No, I’m not a racist. It’s just that they’re from a violent culture. Maybe it is the war. Yes, they don’t integrate well. Have you heard? They don’t even speak our own dialect at school these days, the young use a barbaric mix of Italian and Yugoslavian accent, and their grammar is all wrong. No, we’re not racists, but the boat is full...
As I said in my long rant in German: Idiots! ¹
The Swiss dialect has no grammar and varies wildly from canton to canton. The Italians were not welcome except as workmen of the lowest class, the Turks were not welcome either, and the Yugoslavians are not welcome either. The bastards that ran the campaign against the initiative were not affraid of extrapolating the growth of the muslim population and claiming that it would reach some 300 millions in 2050 (which would be more than the US population)... And the oh-so-peacefull Swiss were the worst war-mongering primitive and uncouth mercenaries in Europe not so long ago, poor and vicious. They had their own little religious war like most of the rest of Europe between the catholics and the protestants... And Germans and Austrians, also no big friends of more immigration, also no fans of muslims, Turks, Yugoslavians, Romanians, Poles, etc. – The gladly marched into a war that killed about fifty million people...
I could go on ranting, but I must try to calm down again or I won’t be able to sleep for the next few hours. Anyway, the movie certainly stirred up some emotions...
#Movies #Untergang