As a nation, we can learn several important lessons from the post-World War II German experience working through their guilt over the Holocaust and combating remnant Nazism (fascism) in their prosperous country, especially after 1989.
They call this “memory” process Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Modern German experiences connect to “hiking” because we also know die Deutschen flocked into youth-oriented hiking clubs in huge numbers before World War I — the so-called Wandering Birds Movement (Wandervogel).
The coed hiking groups remained popular in the 1920s until Adolf Hitler’s Nazis cleverly overwhelmed them and turned them into effective propaganda tools for Fascism. Part of German hyper-nationalism included the disgusting phrase “blood and soil” — and while the racist “pure Blut” idea is clearly anti-Semitic, the Boden (soil) term idealized German/Nordic rural and farm life.
Young Germans — Hermann Hesse is an example — would leave their stuffy and hierarchical German society to “wander” about the spectacular German countryside into the many small forests and pretend they were early “pure” Deutscher, like the ones heroically described by Roman historian Tacitus.
Thus, like Boy Scouts over here, young people’s exuberant hiking clubs in Europe allowed an escape from boring early 20th-century bourgeois society. They formed a protest against industrialization by rambling out into the hinterlands, often the Alps, and there to commune with nature beneath the open Teutonic sky.
However, by 1932, the NSDAP Fascists outlawed these “green” hiking clubs and folded the enthusiastic young hikers into the ultra-Aryan Hitler Youth.
Susan Neiman’s important 2019 book, Learning from the Germans, focuses on these same nature-lovers after World War II and investigates how they overcame their guilt and shame over the Holocaust’s horrors.
The Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung historical process takes years and a complete commitment from the society. It means “working off the past,” and we don’t have an English term for such a demanding cultural relearning. The term is different from the similar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past).
The United States and its World War II Allies failed in their “de-Nazification” programs of 1946 to 1951, and it wasn’t until the late 1960s and ’70s that a new generation of young Germans began to study their elders’ recent violent past and the Holocaust (they were actually called the 68ers after events in 1968).
I lived in then-West Germany in the early 1970s and well recall the incendiary effect of novels such as Günter Grass’ book, The Tin Drum, and Anselm Kiefer’s artworks. The 1978 American four-part TV series Holocaust also shocked a reawakened German public when it aired in West Germany.
Once Chancellor Willy Brandt began a pacifist Ostpolitik foreign policy in 1969 and helped ease the simmering Cold War, postmodern Germans studied their recent history anew, and they spent money in order to help unburden themselves of a truly horrible recent past.
Twenty-first-century reunited Germany (1989) has the world’s most powerful woman as its wise and confident leader (Chancellor Angela Merkel) and arguably leads the 28-member European Union, now with little U.S. support. Working with then-President Barack Obama, Merkel had helped defuse the Russia-Ukraine battles and avoided more outright war in the Donbas region.
Germany thinks forward wisely and clearly, with admirable progressive policies in many areas. Solar power is up to 46 gigawatts capacity of solar power installed across Germany (the United States has 63 gigawatts, and China has 176 capacity). Germany has 1/28th the land area of the United States.
The German social welfare state rests atop a creaky export economy, yet most Germans live really well and on less than half the daily energy usage of a comparable American lifestyle. Almost all young Germans, at least the Bavarians I know in the area around Munich, adore the outdoors and constantly draw their children outside into the many parks and pocket parks.
This exercising mentality and outdoor commitment seem connected to clear-sighted German leadership in other areas. For example, gun control is strict in Germany — and effective.
After the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima, caused by a severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of Japan, Merkel bowed to German public demand and immediately shut down eight of the country’s nuclear power plants, and she pledged to shutter the remaining nine plants by 2022. Based on a June poll, the pro-environment “Greens” party (Die Grüne) is now the country’s leading political party.
Germany and its EU partners have much stricter food-quality controls than the United States, and while it’s more expensive, it does taste better, in my experience. Some Britons have suddenly realized what a real Brexit exit will mean when they’re told that the cleaner and better EU-approved chicken will be replaced by fatty American frozen chicken with the skin drenched in chlorine.
Germans have been leaders in outdoor exploration and enjoyment for well more than 100 years, and their country has been a very strong political leader in supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change which the United States will not sign).
Neiman, an American Jew who grew up in the South, compares the liberated mental health of Germans today with the limited thinking of President Donald Trump’s white supremacist supporters.
Despite some extremists mostly from the former East Germany, there is little nostalgic mythology of a Nazi golden age in Germany today. Yet most of Trump’s white male enthusiasts believe in a twisted myth of the “lost cause.” These Southern celebrations of white heritage are essentially nationalistic, and we observe them strongly represented in the hundreds of memorial statues to Johnny Reb, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, among other racist exemplars.
In modern Germany, however, there are zero statues to their own World War II soldiers (to “Hans Wehrmacht”), and a German “lost cause” proto-Nazi mythology still remains weak (the AfD notwithstanding).
Since these Americans still haven’t gotten past losing the Civil War more than 150 years ago and racism is rampant in the United States still today, Neiman summarizes five ways to change a nation’s prejudices and biases, and these are difficult Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung activities best pondered while out wandering on a forest path:
» The nation has to build a widely accepted national narrative.
» Reinforce the narrative with powerful aesthetic symbols, such as statues to Emmett Till and visits to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., which would also include removal of statues that no longer express our cultural values (and so the background to removing the Lee statues in Charlottesville, Va., that led to a 2017 hate crime murder).
» Education in civics and a unified national narrative is essential and the only way to inculcate feelings of unity in the population.
» Music and song and camping together amplify the national narrative and civics education. (How about singing “Dixie” less often and “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land” more frequently?)
» Make hard-core reparations of some type, tax yourselves to do this and to redistribute wealth to historically persecuted groups.
Neiman’s third point would clearly support the Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Education’s emphasis on “implicit-bias training,” which amazingly remains somewhat controversial even in 2019!
Hiking and pondering along the Rattlesnake Canyon Trail, I wonder at our “cultural proficiency” if we don’t mind the hideous name Indio Muerto that remains on a street sign? What about repositioning or removing the many colonialist Padre Junípero Serra statues at the various Catholic missions? While I absolutely condemn the 2017 beheading of the Santa Barbara Mission’s Serra statue, his recent canonization as Saint Serra should not symbolize colonialist or racist values.
As Neiman writes, “Monuments are values made visible.”
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» Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans (2019). I also recommend her Why Grow Up? Subservise Thoughts for an Infantile Age (2014). Both are available at Chaucer’s Bookstore.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
