(26-02-2022, 10:56 PM)dawg Wrote:(26-02-2022, 10:27 PM)thomil Wrote: ....
However, there are other aspects as well. Generational trauma regarding war, given that may of my age still know people who lived through the war ourselves, is part of the issue.
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What is this Generational trauma ?
One of my parents was in part of the RAF for WWII.
I'm not unusual in this regard ( at least in the vicinity of where I live )
My parents generation seemed to have more or less got over it by the mid 60's. Except for a guy who lived up the road from here and had been in the engineers. He refused to consider buying a German car....so instead he got a Citroen DS 21.....Which was way cooler than anything that came out of Germany at the time
It's not just the war as such. There was also the loss of a lot of ancestral German territory. Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, all of these had been German for generations, in some cases centuries. At the end of the war, this territory was stripped away, the German population there forced to flee, sometimes under horrific circumstances. That is before the shock of the partition of Germany and later the building of the Berlin Wall. Now, while I'm of the opinion that Germany deserved all it got once the shelling of the Westerplatte began, these actions have left extremely deep scars on the German psyche, which were only compounded when the full extent of the holocaust became widely known.
While most of Europe suffered horribly during the war, including the UK, many were spared this territorial dismemberment. Only Poland was equally mauled as far as I remember, with much of THEIR ancestral lands now being part of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Oh, Germans have functionally gotten over it alright, and for my generation, the War is mainly a historic event. However, Germans as a whole know their history very well and that colours policy decisions to this day.
EDIT: Oh, and you're damn right, that DS 21 is cool as hell!
Money talks. Mine always says goodbye!