Awww, I get all bleary-eyed at all the nice '<hug Germany> or <3 Germany comments.
<sniffle> <pulls out hanky> <bloooort> <wipes nose>.
Love the SatW comics... sooo great.
But for me it does so apply. I am one of the 'old farts' around here, so, yeah, I have parents that were born at the time.
Mind you, my father was born 1932, my mother seven years later... so , no, they didn't have anything to do either with any war-crimes, or with supporting Hitler. Yet the mantra: "Never forget, never repeat" is soooo appropriate.
Somehow I still feel the need to apologize for something I didn't do, or didn't have any chance of stopping.
Irrational, I know... but it has been ingrained deeply.
I have so many friends from across the globe: Dutch, Swedish, US-Americans, English, Scottish. We get along just great.
The funniest/most-screwed-up thing (depending on how you want to look at it) happened when I visited my mate in London in 1991. I was 21 at the time.
He is English but speaks an absolutely flawless German. He asked me to refresh his German a bit during my stay (not that he needed it) so we gabbled away in German a lot, even in public. An old lady overheard us in the London tube, and she mumbled, not really under her breath: "Look at them damn Nazis."
We just looked at each other while keeping up our conversation and then switched to perfect cockney accent in mid-sentence (yeah, I visited London often at that time, so I actually had a chance to pull off a few sentences in that accent). The mortified look on that lady's face was just worth it.
Later at home my mate apologized to me for that incident. Strange, isn't it?!?
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Awww, I get all bleary-eyed at all the nice '<hug Germany> or <3 Germany comments.
<sniffle> <pulls out hanky> <bloooort> <wipes nose>.
Love the SatW comics... sooo great.
But for me it does so apply. I am one of the 'old farts' around here, so, yeah, I have parents that were born at the time.
Mind you, my father was born 1932, my mother seven years later... so , no, they didn't have anything to do either with any war-crimes, or with supporting Hitler. Yet the mantra: "Never forget, never repeat" is soooo appropriate.
Somehow I still feel the need to apologize for something I didn't do, or didn't have any chance of stopping.
Irrational, I know... but it has been ingrained deeply.
I have so many friends from across the globe: Dutch, Swedish, US-Americans, English, Scottish. We get along just great.
The funniest/most-screwed-up thing (depending on how you want to look at it) happened when I visited my mate in London in 1991. I was 21 at the time.
He is English but speaks an absolutely flawless German. He asked me to refresh his German a bit during my stay (not that he needed it) so we gabbled away in German a lot, even in public. An old lady overheard us in the London tube, and she mumbled, not really under her breath: "Look at them damn Nazis."
We just looked at each other while keeping up our conversation and then switched to perfect cockney accent in mid-sentence (yeah, I visited London often at that time, so I actually had a chance to pull off a few sentences in that accent). The mortified look on that lady's face was just worth it.
Later at home my mate apologized to me for that incident. Strange, isn't it?!?