Rallies All Over Germany.

A lot of people took to the streets the past weekend, protesting against the AfD and their plans to transport us back in time to the Nazi era. Which is a very good thing! You can read a little overview about the rallies here. At least that did go quite well, with lots and lots of citizens standing up and making it clear that we do not want right-wing fascist idiots and arseholes in our government.

It is really, really uncanny to see the parallels between the rise of the AfD now and the rise of the NSDAP back not even a hundred years ago. But apparently, humans are very, very good at forgetting things, especially shitty things. We had a really interesting discussion with some of our friends on the weekend about this. Approximately two generations, one of our friends said, would be the timespan that big impact events would be remembered. Such as, say, World War II.

I was the youngest in the group, and because my gran lived a very long time, I did get to hear some of her stories from wartime, and from after the war. My granddad died when I was five, and I don't remember him talking about the war (he was a soldier, and only did not end up in Stalingrad due to some crazy good luck - he brought his new wife home to his parents, as her family had been bombed out, and when he was supposed to meet up with his company afterwards, he was unable to find them. They went to Stalingrad.) My grand-uncle talked a tiny little bit about his time on a submarine during the war when they visited us, but his wife didn't like that and tried to put a stop to it as soon as she heard it - so there were not a lot of stories from him that I heard.

Even with my own close or close-ish relatives talking about their own experiences, they are very, very far removed from what I can imagine. Some things you just can't conceive of unless you've had a similar experience - and luckily, I've grown up in times of blissful peace and abundance.

And as we chatted about this, the Most Patient Husband of Them All realised that most of the wartime and post-wartime stories that he had heard were from my gran as well, as his grandparents either did not talk about the time, or died too early for him to actually get the first-hand accounts. 

So to me, it's very understandable now that events get forgotten in the third generation, and even the second generation after the first-hand witnesses may have gaps in their knowledge. Because, let's face it, you also need to have an interest in the (hi)stories, and sometimes they are so far removed from what seems important, or worthy of attention, to a child or teenager or young adult with their own problems and troubles and social obligations that they might just not be remembered.

I'm just hoping now that enough of a memory remains here in Germany to stop a repetition of the Third Reich... at least the rallies are a good start, and a good sign. Hopefully the politicians who got the utterly stupid idea that they'd get more voters if they also copy the fascist talk and right-wing strategies are now realising that this is not the case, and they'd better take a clear stance against this inhumane bullshit. 

The next elections, coming up soon, will show us more. We're certainly living in interesting times.