Germany

Counting the Living

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Back in 2020, I read a New York Times article about a crowdsourced, online project to digitize records with the Arolsen Archives, the keepers of the world’s largest archive on victims and survivors of National Socialism (Nazism). The goal of the #everynamecounts initiative is to create a digital memorial with records accessible to all.

With thousands of volunteers around the world, I type whatever information there is. Sometimes I’m familiar with the names because of the community I grew up in and where I live now. Sometimes I recognize locations. One project involved documenting records of prisoners held in the concentration camp Buchenwald. I live within cycling distance of Buchenwald and have been up there more than a handful of times.

I most enjoy working on records of displaced people. These are the survivors, the young children with huge names, the defiant elders, the unbreakable adults. The documents indicate where they came from, and where they were sent to, and when. People were living in DP facilities until the early 1950s. Sailed to New York. Flight to London.

I wonder about the workers who took down these records, the handwriting of people all over the world, the very human touch of both condemning and saving a life. There is handwriting that loops and weaves, handwriting that took the time, handwriting that scratched and scrawled. Name. Marital status. Birthplace. Last address. Location. There are typed records, too, an indication that all of this happened in a world different from ours, yet not so long ago.

As I record lives lost and lives saved, I think about the internationalism of these records. Europe in ruins, its condemned minorities and those unlucky enough to have a non-conformist opinion collected and shipped off. To somewhere. Europe’s ravaged population surviving wherever they ended up, many so far from home.

And the internationalism of 175,000 volunteers around the world who painstakingly transcribe documents holding the stories of 17.5 million people. To guard against mistakes, each document is read by several volunteers. Any areas that cannot be read according to the usual guidelines are then checked by a member of the Arolsen Archives team. Seventeen and a half million individuals and their stories are too precious for error.

Two weeks ago, quite by accident, we drove past the town where the International Centre on Nazi Persecution, home of the Arolsen Archives, is located. I transcribed a few more documents the next day.

Every name counts.

View from the Buchenwald Memorial – March 2022
On My Mind

Bad Day

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I caught up to a new colleague while cycling home through the park last week. We’d had our first real conversation just weeks earlier at a wine tasting, which led us to meet in a café days later to continue our conversation. Like many of us who move around, she was looking to find her people. We’re a small school without much transience, and I appreciate that this can be hard to do. I was new once, too.

As one does, I asked about her day and was surprised by the response. “Actually it wasn’t that great,” she said, and I asked if she wanted to tell me more. We rode together until the path forked and I continued towards home.

She’d had a bad day and thanked me for talking about it with her. I was happy to listen, had related some of my own experiences, and had tried to ask questions that might prompt a change of perspective. It wasn’t until I was cycling home the next day, alone, that I realized how seldomly we actually answer the question, “How was your day?”.

I had an administrator once whose classic reply was, “Do you care?”, meant to prompt the asker into thinking about the question. That there’s only one real answer to that question presents its own difficulties. Based on personal observation, Germans tend to avoid the question entirely and just ask how you are. Whether talking about one’s day factors into the answer is purely optional.

Thinking about it from this perspective, I was flattered that my colleague had given me a real answer. It had meant some vulnerability on her part, and that’s not easy with people we’re trying to get to know. But that is the way to get to know people, according to the social penetration theory that my psychology students and I study. Relationships tend to move from superficial and shallow to deeper and more intimate, and people tend to like individuals who share more deeply, leading them to do so in return.

Through the conversation about the bad day, my colleague and I learned a little bit more about each other. We found some commonalities, recognized that others are there for us when we’re open to them, and strengthened a connection. And that’s not a bad way to begin building a friendship.

Germany

An Outside/Inside Look at German Politics

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We had elections in Germany on Sunday and I went with my partner to vote. I waited on the playground of the school, hoping that my presence there counted as doing my part for democracy. Political discussions have remained at the forefront of many conversations between friends and colleagues, so I thought I’d summarize for those interested in, but not following, German politics.

In short, the results were unsurprising. The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming in second and sweeping the East, where I live. The Social Democrats (SPD), coming in third with the worst showing in modern history, are the most-likely coalition partner for the CDU because all parties have unequivocally ruled out working with the AfD. Two parties, the libertarian Free Democrats (FDP) and the new quasi-communist BSW, did not cross the 5% hurdle necessary to sit in the Bundestag (Parliament), but the Greens and Left will be represented, leading to a Bundestag comprised of five parties.

The current political task, while the old Parliament continues the business of governing, is building a governing coalition, which takes as long as it takes. The CDU has announced hopes to have a coalition by mid-April, but the conditions must first be discussed, debated, and agreed upon between the parties, which takes time. From a good English news source, the process is here. As noted in this article, even though a CDU/SPD coalition is the only sensible option, it still has to happen. And we’re not there yet.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the CDU and SPD are very different parties, which is why the SPD didn’t invite the CDU into a coalition after winning the 2021 elections. (That the FDP was there instead, along with the Greens, directly led to the failure of the coalition and the need for new elections.) Conservatives and social democrats tend to stand on opposite sides of moderate, and Germany is no exception. Like other states with social welfare systems, Germany’s right-of-centre is definitely left of American right-of-centre, but that also places the left-of-centre further to the left. As a result, there are significant differences in values and political programs that need to be addressed, and the discussion of what to do with the “debt brake” will most certainly play a role. Yet, a Grand Coalition is the only sensible option because these are two historic parties who aim to preserve democracy. Together, they have a majority, and it’s easier to govern with fewer coalition partners, as the recent failure of the “Traffic Light” SPD/FDP/Greens shows us.

However, the AfD will say that the choice for a Grand Coalition does not reflect the will of the people because the AfD received more votes than the SPD. They will continue to vote against everything that anyone else supports (evidence here, though only in German) because their goal is to destroy regardless of a political campaign to rebuild.

This is why the CDU and SPD need to put aside their differences and rebuild. Understandably, voters leaning towards different parties identified different issues of importance (informative diagrams, though only in German), meaning that the two parties need to attend to a vast swath of concerns in order for the people to feel that politicians have heard them. If they cannot, the AfD will be even stronger by 2029 and democracy will be at risk.

The question of why those from East and West Germany voted so differently (scroll to the middle of the page for a map) is important and relevant. The answer is not to demonize the East as being backward and provincial, but rather to think about the last 30 years of history. A reunified Germany was not an economically equal Germany and we are still feeling the effects of this today. This article addresses the economic, social, and cultural transitions after the fall of the Berlin Wall that, in many ways, dismantles former East Germany and left its people, their skills, and their education behind.

In my analysis, and I am not unique here, this leaves one choice. The choice is to think of the good of the collective rather than the goals of a single party. This is the choice because life needs to improve for all of us in order to protect the democracy and the country that we live in. Germany is not the United States and this gives Germany an opportunity to forge a different path, one more closely tied to the EU, which needs the support of its member states more than ever. Eighty percent of Germans, represented by a historic (since reunification in 1990) high 82.5% of those eligible to vote, voted against the AfD. They voted for democracy and for Europe and for the future.

As a freshly-minted permanent resident, I have chosen to be part of this society and yet have no say in it. So here it is: It is my hope that the CDU and SPD see the necessity of working in a strong partnership to bring this country back together. The alternative would let Germany drift further down a path that threatens to erode what this country claims to stand for.

The people have spoken. And now we need the politicians to do the same.

Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place