The Peculiarly Bittersweet Burden of Being ‘German-American’

I belong to a German-American club in my city of residence. It is, incidentally, the oldest in the entire state of California, having been founded back in 1854. In a nation as recent as the United States (relative to most other nations of the world), that’s nothing short of phenomenal. My club is a large organization with just under a thousand members and its chief building is a beautiful and skillfully put together, two-story edifice that evidences the highly trained craftsmanship of the German immigrants responsible for its construction.

As a person with Austrian roots on the maternal side of the family (formerly in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire region known as Krain, now the independent European state of Slovenia), I take great pride in my ancestral connections with German-speaking Europe. Additionally, I am a member (‘Mitglieds’, as we call the term in the German language) of several other Austrian/German organisations, among them Die Naturfreunde Touristenverein (NF/TVN International), the German, Austrian & Swiss Alpine Clubs and an ancient fraternal order of German people called Die Hermann Sohne.

Naturally, with part of my family originating in the Catholic speaking southern regions of Austro-German settled Europe (the other parts hail from Ireland), I greatly enjoy the traditional fests, activities and cultural events that characterise customs in Bayern (Bavaria) and Österreich (Austria). Each year holds much enjoyment and pleasure in the annual fests, such as Maifest (Spring Festival), Sommerfest (Summer Festival), Herbstfest (Fall Festival), Erntedankfest (Thanksgiving) and Oktoberfest, not to mention the rich celebrations of Catholic religious holidays such as those observed at Christmas (Weihnachts), Lent (Fasching) & New Year. [Mind, I am NOT a conventionally religious person; I’m actually an atheist, but I love most colorful religious customs as a sort of ‘primitive art form’.]

At these fests, no small part of the fun exists in donning traditional ‘Trachten’, or ancient regional clothing that characterises each small regional part of Austrian & German areas. Coming from Austria as my family do, ‘Lederhosen’ and ‘Dirndls’ at such times seem almost unremarkable and wearing these visual reminders of German heritage adds immeasurably to the overall merriment and fun one has at such gatherings. Of course, beer (particularly for Germans) and wine (more to some Austrian tastes) also play a large part in the celebrations and what good Bavarian could possibly think of a festival without beer?…especially since some of the world’s finest beer comes from Germany (and there’s the added fact that it was due to German immigrants settling in all parts of the world that most famous beers, such as Tsingtao in China and Sapporo in Japan…to name just two…came into being).

And while there is much greatly enjoyable camaraderie, dancing and attendant celebrating going on at such times, there is undeniably also a somewhat darker underlying current just below the surface of all that ethnic frivolity. I speak of the particularly uncomfortable feeling of vague guilt that so many of German-American heritage suffer from, thanks to one relatively short period of world history that spanned less than 24 years: the National Socialist era in Germany.

This reluctance to take full pride in one’s German heritage is particularly notable in the older members of German-American organisations, since many of them still have palpable recollections and memories of those times, not to mention parents who probably participated willingly and eagerly in National Socialist Germany’s darkest period (a few of our older members were actually serving in the WW2 German ‘Wehrmacht’). However, even the relatively much younger ones also feel discernibly affected by that onerous taint of collective guilt to the point where their celebration of German heritage often takes on a slightly and perhaps subtle lower-key nature than one might expect.

There is much irony to be found herein, especially in modern America, with the former ‘melting pot of the world’ and present ‘culture of diversity’ traditions of our nation hovering in the cultural background like some ill-defined entity with unsettling spectral presence. While everywhere across America cultural groups of often extremely diverse race, origin and cultural background are politically lauded and encouraged to explore their particularly diverse uniqueness and social heritage, German-Americans (and German people in Germany) have trouble proclaiming pride in their own cultural heritage in the world, even at such moments when the entire focus is on celebrating German culture and having fun among other Germans. It is an interesting but also unsettling status quo, it would seem to someone like me who feels no overweening need to adopt an apologetic attitude for possible political, economic and/or social transgressions of another time & place.

The principal reason for this collective German angst, in my opinion, is the unrelenting and subtly pernicious effort made by Jewish and Israeli organisations to keep their ‘Shoah’ (the so-called ‘Holocaust’, regarded as if it were the ONLY holocaust the world has ever experienced) fresh and alive in the minds of everyone, everywhere, all the time (but particularly in the US, where Jewish power, wealth and influence is especially well-entrenched and concentrated). While there’s little argument that the persecution of Jews was a horrific thing, the Hitler regime did not have a franchise on extreme anti-Jewish (often mischaracterized as ‘anti-Semitism, which is flagrantly incorrect given that the ‘Semitic’ group of peoples includes most of the Arabs in the Middle East as well as the Hebrews) bias, as the Jewish people have been unendingly persecuted since biblical times (notably in Stalin’s Russia, of course, and well before that under the Russian Tsars) by nearly everyone.

What the Germans did, interestingly enough, and with typical German scientific precision, organization, optimisation and exactitude, was to formularise that persecution in a manner not previously seen in the world. With all the ‘benefits’ of modern science and technology employed with characteristic German super-efficiency, the German National Socialists under Hitler turned that persecution into a process hallmarked by its absolute and methodically proficient efficiency. Regrettably, given the German tendency to partition off emotion from reasoning and keep the two qualities distinctly separate from each other in the conduct of business (any business, even the ‘disposing’ of unwanted peoples), the German National Socialists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in alienating the entire world. [It's a fact that human beings tend to make assessments & decisions based more on emotion than on intellectual analysis. Think of, as a modern paradigmic parallel, ‘reality TV’. That's about as vicariously superficial an emoting experience as you get find anywhere].

Beyond that early ‘success’, when they eventually lost the war, the national Socialists made the fatal mistake of putting themselves in the crosshairs of Zionists everywhere, who today have both figuratively and functionally broadly relegated ALL Germans to a special level of hell, as heinous, perpetually suspect predators of the Jewish people and their Jewish faith.

In an examination of this, it is interesting to note that, as was remarked upon by no other a source than The Bell Curve, Herrnstein & Murrays’ famed 1994 expostulation on the role of IQ in the development of human society, Jews as a distinctly unique cultural AND religious group (since culture & religion are inextricably synonymous in their case) are significantly brighter than average members of the general population. It has been shown to my satisfaction (and many in the academic communities) that Jews remain well above the norm in terms of their aggregate intellect and intelligence among the general population. In other words, they’re smart little buggers, by and large (to use the vernacular for a moment), and although they tend to be intellectual thinkers in greater proportions than the norm, they also tend towards heightened emotional sensitivity when it comes to regarding their common socio-religious heritage. There is therefore an automatic if unconscious cohesiveness among Jews that is conspicuously absent in the Christian (or other) religious faith, and when you’ve made one Jew angry, you are not deemed merely to be an ignorant, obnoxious individual, but part of an established, world-wide conspiracy of Jew-haters.

Regrettably, due to the settlement of large numbers of Jewish people in the United States (and their proven ability to achieve success and wealth in commerce, again due to possession of both above-average intelligence and their high regard for education, among other things), any ‘enemy’ of a single Jew is instantly an enemy of the entire faith, race, culture and religion of Jews everywhere. Thus it was with the German National Socialists, who made the disgraceful mistake of losing the Second World War, thereupon relegating the entire surviving German people and their cultural heritage to the pantheon of most-hated enemies of the Jewish race FOREVER.

Forget the fact that all that happened 70 years or more in the past (by the way, it wasn't six millions exterminated, only about one and a half million); the Jews will NEVER forgive Germans for having tried to clear them out of what German at that time conceived of as the perfectly ordered Aryan world. And due to the fact that Jewish money and influence exists everywhere throughout the social-economy of America (in Hollywood, the media, everywhere), Jewish ‘persecution’ of anything German shall likely persist into the foreseeable future, without historical ‘reality checks or revisionist constraint. Believe me, no one hates with a passion equal to Jews who feel they have been wronged!

Most average people in America are not deep thinkers. In fact most cannot think any further than the narrow confines of modern ‘social media’ these days, where semi-ignorant and emotionally rampant mind-sets transmit post-adolescent nonsense as virally as would a highly contagious disease (smallpox comes nicely to mind). It’s a statistical fact that most television programming (and all media, with a very few exceptions) is produced with a target audience projected to have no more than a 6th grader’s awareness of life in general. Jewish people, therefore, in the form of their organised groups, affiliations and associations when they are able, tend to encourage, optimize and exploit the vulnerabilities of this ‘average national population of 6th graders’ through subtle sub-rosa manipulations involving funding of media programs and ‘educational’ propaganda that subtly support Jewish aims & aspirations. Roman Catholics don‘t do much of this. Mormons don’t do it much more than Catholics and hardly anyone does this in the same way, with as much devastating impact as the Jews.

The American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) is a good example of a highly influential arena in which a lot of not-so-subtle pro-Jewish and anti-German media is funded and aired. It’s hardly any wonder that among the most common themes featured in PBS programming are recurrent documentaries illustrating the ‘depravity’ of Second World War National Socialists in their persecution of the Jews. In additional to heavy promotion of ‘diversity’ in PBS offerings (Hispanic, Black cultural matters in particular), no month of PBS local programming is bereft of at least one or two recapitulations of the terrible sufferings of the Jews in the ‘Holocaust’. Although the exact sources of funding that supports PBS are hazy and uncertain, it’s a reasonable bet that many of the chief supporters of PBS are individuals and/or groups that have some sort of affinity with or affiliation to the Jewish faith.

Just this past week I was confounded by yet another ‘educational’ documentary about how the German Federal Republic resisted efforts to disclose documentation on suspected National Socialist war criminals that were contained in the Bundesrepublic central repository for documents. The film was both repugnant, insulting and annoying, since it doesn’t take three active brain cells to discertain that a predominant political underlying agenda at PBS is its leftist liberal progressive ‘doctrinology’, long a favorite substrate medium for extreme left-leaning socialists who specialise in media. Of course, the Jews know that by cleverly lumping their ‘cause’ in conveniently with that of other ‘persecuted minority’ peoples (i.e. Blacks, principally), they gain even further credibility. Hence the other major theme predominating on PBS programming: Black cultural affairs and history, which are way out of proportion to programs featuring the sufferings of Native Americans, Mexicans and Asian peoples in America.

It’s not that I object to recurrent PBS documentaries about Jews and their faith, or about other diverse cultural groups (such as Blacks & Hispanics, or even Islamic peoples). What I object to is the fact that PBS treats the public like small school children who need repetitive training in consciousness raising that they would otherwise not be expected to acquire by themselves. And as we all know, the lessons of propaganda as originated by Edward Bernays in his pioneering 1928 expostulation (Propaganda) on the methodology of influencing public opinion, stressed the importance of emphasis and repetition in getting across whatever ‘message’ is intended to influence the attitudes and opinions of others. We certainly see this at work in the relentless efforts by PBS to drum the supremely unquestioned dogma of diversity into us, despite the fact that diversity as a concept does not function (or even thrive) as a self-contained, stand-alone process (it requires a generalized group desire to acculturate into the social mainstream, something rejected by too many recent partisan ‘separate interest groups’ that wish to retain their cultural distinctiveness unchanged from its origins).

The influential left-leaning prime movers behind American PBS are no dummies, of course, because they got their university degrees at the same place other leftist intellectuals do and they’ve likely read Bernays as undergraduates. Hence we continue to have these programs vilifying yet again the perennially archetypal ultimate villains, the German National Socialists. Which probably wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that the ‘average’ person doesn’t fully understand or appreciate the fact that the Germans prior to 1920 or those in modern Germany today are not the Nazis of that unfortunate 1920-through-1945 period in German history. And because those same ‘average’ people tend to not be very discriminatory in their higher perceptions of fact and associative reasoning, the only things that stand out to them whenever the word ‘German’ is uttered are those same horrifically evil Nazis that the PBS (and History Channel) programs continue to delight in highlighting.

In his excellent 2011 released book titled The German Genius, its author, British academician Peter Watson begins that 1000 page epic work, exploring centuries of German contributions to the advancement of cultural refinement, by stating that modern England has rationally defined its present day entire cultural raison d’etre by virtue of its ‘successful’ defeat of the German National Socialists in WW2. Of course the fact that without substantial help from the United States the UK would now be a German province is conveniently overlooked and instead, Nazi Germany’s fall is perceived by most younger Brits as a vindication of centuries of arrogant and sometime cruel British subjugation of other cultures, peoples and lands. Mention ‘the Germans’ to any British adolescent today and the only association that is forthcoming is a fuzzy awareness of ‘those bloody Nazi scum’. In writing his book, Watson set out, partly due to this appalling lack of awareness about the immense contributions of German kultur to the erstwhile ‘civilised’ world, to correct this ignorance and help to set the record straight, that ‘the Germans’ are not ‘those bloody awful Nazis’.

Of course, to the contrary, it is in Judaism's best interests to keep that particular gaping wound both fresh and bloody, and they do that only too methodically by virtue of their constant and repetitive media obsessions with Germany’s rather brief National Socialist era.

My greater point here is that while in Politically Correct America it’s not just socially acceptable, but supremely laudable to celebrate one’s diversity, no such parallel option exists for us poor German-Americans (or for modern Federal Germany itself…keep in mind those most recent egregious comparisons made by Turkey’s President Erdogan between Nazi Germany and the modern Federal Republic, insinuations of which are both unfathomably false and grossly insulting), since the Jews want to constantly browbeat our '6th-grader awareness public' over the head with reminders of Nazi atrocities (and of course, they were just that…but that’s beside my point here, since the world sees fresh atrocities occur nearly every day…and has since the dawn of history).

Accordingly, when I initially joined my Sacramento German-American club, I was full of enthusiasm for sharing my pride in our shared heritage. It didn’t take long for that, however, to bring quietly expressed and somewhat pained opinions that this wasn’t such a good idea, because…dot, dot, dot. In other words, my fellow German-Austrian-descended members continually labor under apprehension and vague fear that drawing TOO much attention to Sacramento’s German-American cultural activities will somehow bring unfavorable attention and perhaps even overt expressions of renewed, accusatory insinuation about ‘all those Neo-Nazis’ in ‘that club’. Of course most people are not sophisticated enough in their discernment and/or perceptions to even be able to differentiate between Neo-Nazis, Skinheads, ‘fascists’ and ordinary, responsible, civic-minded individuals who just happen to be of German ancestry…a status quo that all the pro-Jewish, anti-Nazi programming simply helps to further muddle in the vast empty spaces that constitute the public's consciousness!

To say this is all very discouraging and upsetting is understating things considerably, since German-ancestried people are among the most socially responsible, civic-minded, positive contributing and intelligent members of just about any community. And anyone taking the trouble to search out Germans closely involved in just about every aspect of the founding of not just American democracy, but the State of California itself, would quickly realise exactly how insinuatively disingenuous this ignorant bias against all things German actually is. But who, in today’s knee-jerk world of mindless social media excess, takes the time for such higher-level reflections? Not many.

Unfortunately, this is the subtly disabling burden that we who have ancestral roots in Germany and Austria labor under and as long as Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel/anti-Arab interest groups continue their broad campaign of guilt-mongering disparagement against all things German, there’s likely to be no let-up even in the near future (as Holocaust survivors eventually pass on the anti-German torch to their younger generations in a ‘heritage’ context).

This sort of thing is disheartening to the extreme in a nation such as ours that fancies itself a free and open society, since the wrong people are being stigmatized by all this. It amounts to guilt by public opinion and that is perceived as more damning than legal indictment before the bench itself! Meanwhile, those peripatetic left-leaning liberal progressives among us (many of whom are undoubtedly Jewish pseudo-intellectuals and socialist in every pore of their bodies) continue to promote immigration to America of Islamic peoples who, owing to the radically harsh nature of their austere and fundamental religious beliefs, are apt at any particular moment to go ‘critical mass’ and join the radical Islamic terrorist actions that are so ubiquitous these days.

I say ‘austere and fundamental’ fully mindful of the fact that Islam is a lot more than just that, having spent 15 years working and living among the Arab peoples in the Southwest Asian region; but unfortunately the radical element is not immediately distinguishable from the moderate elements of Islam until too late and we simply haven’t the time, the patience, or the economic resources available in our increasingly complex society to give the benefit of the doubt to ANYONE, let alone immigrants from nations that spawned radical Islam. But this is an entirely separate issue, of course, except for the fact that Jews and those of Jewish faith (read: Israel and lobbying groups like the highly manipulative American Israel Public Affairs Committee, B’nai B’rith, et al) find it also convenient to their interests to align themselves, at present, with the Christian West against the Arabs. [Well, the Arabs have a saying for that: "My father and brother against my Uncle; my Uncle and I against the outsider."]

Sadly, this overall atmosphere of cast aspersions against all things German by those of Jewish heritage also profoundly affects the German Federal Republic itself (again for the same reasons mentioned earlier) and it is doubtful if the sad legacy of National Socialism in Germany will ever be buried and successfully gotten beyond. In this vein, monitoring as I do various international ties and media links to the German press, it is painfully apparent that the leftist liberal political elements presently in charge of the German Government are also using that awful Nazi legacy to promote their own leftist slanted PC ‘diversity’ efforts, a trend that is already starting to create untenable social problems in Germany and that shall in future have even more profound impact on the nation.

Fortunately, before too long I shall myself be dead and gone and this will all no longer be of any consequent importance, as far as I am directly concerned (why do I always end up saying that, I wonder?). Still, it is sad to reflect on the fact that humanity is so totally, hopelessly and ineradicably f*cked-up.

Meanwhile, excuse me while I go don my Maifest hat, grab my Steinmass and prepare for some good old gustatory German imbibing as the annual celebration of Bock Bier nears.

By the way, I understand we’re serving kosher beer this year… Prost & l’chaim, y’all!

-------------------------------------------

An interesting link: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati/