I'm not that liberal!
I don't like to be introduced to Germans by my good Jewish friends, such as you.
Just because "I was standing there?" Couldn't you have ignored me? You HAD to be polite!!
When he held out his hand, I didn't want to take it. Why should I be put into such a position? But, I, too, had to be polite.
Talk about coercion!
I felt as if I had bowed down to an idol.
Like the Indian delegate had said, "We learned that coexistence with the Chinese doesn't work."
We Jews learned that language, culture, citizenship, legal rights, history, contributions to science, medicine, sacrifice, soldiery, heroism - complete identification didn't work either.
Now we are faced with a double dilemma. We must believe that this type of virulent anti-semitism was an especial German disease and not the malady of all Christendom, so that when we hear about swastikas here and there, we can say, "There's always a lunatic fringe" and if we hear of a murder here or a rape there, we can say, "There are always psychotics about".
But Germany is different. Germany is the pariah!
And if we admit Germany back into our society, to effectuate "coexistence", aren't we actually saying that anti-semitism is not a German specific phenomena but world wide and must be lived with. We have to be "realistic".
Realistic is a word used whenever you throw pride, loyalty and spiritual inhibition out the window.
"You've probably heard from children, "Gee, Mom, be realistic. Everyone cheats in exams."
Or "Be realistic - we have to send arms to Germany!"
We have to have "trefa" food on our planes and boats,"
Have you considered how much we Jews, whose whole existence and struggle for existence has been a paean to pride and spiritual inhibition lose by being "realistic"?
For me, every time I have to make a personal concession to a German or swallow a national one, something in me shivers and dies.
And I think the first one to understand this and what I mean would be that very German - if he had been as I later heard -imprisoned in Auschwitz - because he must have felt, with every Jew who was shut up behind the gate with him, bits of his Germanship being killed, foe he could not have disassociated himself. He was a German! Perhaps he will bring back a good regime. Perhaps it can't be done!
We know that Nazism is far from dead and what small flames have been lit in small hearts of the new generation by their fathers, we do not know, nor what ill wind can fan the smoulderings into harrowing flames.
Can't we be "liberal" and steer a course free of Germans!