Night of Broken Glass Ended Jewish Life in Germany
tvpworld.com
tvpworld.com
"I remember Kristallnacht. I was 11 years old. You heard that on this street a house burned down or that there are rambunctious people coming. There may have been five buildings vandalized in Bautzen. I saw a house with some damage, mainly windows broken. People were going in and out of the house. It did not seem significant at the time. They didn’t even talk about Kristallnacht in the paper. It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews. There was no specific graffiti on those vandalized houses. In a small town like Bautzen, there wasn’t much of a Kristallnacht but when you went to bigger cities there probably was. But I didn’t know about it at the time. I only realized the magnitude of it after the war.
What was more noticeable was Nazi propaganda. There were banners that read something like, “Jews are our misfortune.” There were signs on almost all shops indicating whether they were Jewish or not. Most of them were not Jewish. This was a big thing!"
This is one of the most fascinating parts of the Nazi rise to power to me. The sheer mundanity of it all. So many questions.
- what events today seem like ‘not a big deal’ but will go down in history like kristalnacht?
- Hitler is a byword for evil now, but at the time he was just another mundane talking head. We remember him as a frothing monster, but he was just a man, nothing special: Bavarian postmaster. Which talking head alive today will carry that legacy?
- Could it have been prevented? How do you stop the mundane effectively? Is it happening right now? Could we even tell?
Could it have been prevented at the time? I highly doubt it, what the nazis did was push to the extreme and industrialize what many European nations had been doing already for centuries. Socially the concept of universal human rights was still very recent and not widely accepted.
Yes we can tell, and it is happening right now, the warning signs are in plain sight. Look at the rise of right wing extremism in the United States, resulting in increasing numbers of terrorist attacks. It has been directly enabled by the language used in political discourse and what it has rendered permissible. Can it be prevented now from getting worse? Time will tell, but at least the election results from yesterday show that there is yet some hope. One should not be complacent though, the Nazis never achieved more than 30 some percent in open elections before they completely took over.