& & &

I’m reading the autobiography of German’s most puplically known feminist, Alice Schwarzer, (she was super important for the feminist movement in France and Germany in the 70ies) right now. There’s that passage about her watching the Polnish film “Passenger” with her French boyfriend. It’s a film about the Holocaust, and when Schwarzer was crying by the time they got out of the movie theatre her boyfriend tried to comfort her by saying “It’s not your fault” (Schwarzer was born in 1940), she writes “That’s true and yet… I do not believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective shame.”

I just cried my eyes out after reading that. Exactly. That’s it. It’s a feeling I’ve always had and that had so much influence on how my parents chose to raise me, on the stuff I spent most of my teenage years with and the way I grew up to think and act, on basically everything in my life and I never even could name it.

I always thought that if I was good enough or aware enough it’d go away, that I could make peace with myself, with being German, but that probably isn’t the point. I’m glad, really, for each and every sting of it. What I really couldn’t deal with was oblivion.