I normally don't find myself on a computer when I'm on vacation, but I've had a lot of down time on this vacation (I'm in the Caribbean with my family) and had free internet access. I met a fascinating person who's about my age who grew up in Communist Germany named Madlen - she's 31 and was 14 when the Berlin Wall came down. We wound up talking with her for about an hour; she had a bad experience with someone Jewish. When they found out she was German, beforehand they were really quite nice to her and befriended her. Once they found out - they turned cold and stopped talking to her. So - since she doesn't interact with many Jewish people, being Jewish she asked my husband and I if most Jews disliked Germans. I explained to her my perspective - it's a generation gap where people my parents' age and older may not have a desire to learn more or experience visiting Germany, and even some people my grandparents' age hate Germans. Understandably, being alive during WWII it's obvious where those feelings come from, but being a child of Generation X, which I consider a somewhat "rebellious generation", it makes me really uncomfortable when someone says something like "well their people killed ours" -- but what does that have to do with those descendants today?
As for my husband and I - it's more of a fascination with a culture and finding someone our age who "only got bananas twice a year" and wasn't allowed to watch American tv, it was a unique and educational perspective I'd never heard before. Madlen was taught that Hitler was bad and what he did was wrong, but she also had no opportunity to learn about religion and has no religion herself.
Wow. My first semi-political post.
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That's kind of cool that you got to do that. Germany is a beautiful country and if you get the chance to go, it has some great places to go see (like the castles in Southern Bavaria).
My parents and upwards are against the Germans because of losing family in the war etc, but it did not stop me from making friends with a German lady and actually meeting up and staying with her three years ago. She is one of the first people I ever chatted to on the net and we are like sisters. You are so right when you say it has nothing to do with OUR generation. :-)
Enjoy the rest of your vacation!
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