Holger the German

I have been in Oceania (Australia and NZ) for almost one month now and have had only one roommate from the United States, and even that roommate was from Hawaii. One of my current roommates is a 24 year old named Holger Eshbach (could that name be more German?) from Germany. Unfortunately, he isn't related to Al Eshbach (if you aren't from OK, he's a big OU football guy on the radio). In fact, when I saw his last name I said "Oh, Ash-Back!" and he burst out laughing "it's actually pronounced esh-baaach." Whatever.

Anyways, I'm always interested to learn how people from other countries view things that happened in the past. For example, when learning about WWI and WWII in America we learn of triumphant stories about victory and defeating the evil Germans and Japanese. But how is it taught in Germany? It would be weird learning about how your country (not too long ago) spiraled out of control, slaughtered millions of innocent people and consequently lost the two greatest wars in the history of mankind.

So I asked Holger about what they are taught about the World Wars and how they view the past in Germany. I found it to be a pretty sensitive subject for him. He said the World Wars are a huge focus in their history classes at every grade level and that it is taught with the intention of educating the new generations of why those wars occurred to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. However, he said in normal life no one really talks about the past and that people are pretty embarrassed about it.

One funny thing he said was if you ask any German about Hitler they will most likely reply "Hitler was an Austrian, not a German." Hitler actually was from Austria.

Throughout the conversation Holger kept on saying things like "it wasn't my generation that did that stuff, we are not at fault" or "we have learned from our mistakes in the past and it will never happen again." I found this weird that he was getting kind of defensive because I was in no way putting blame on him. But then he started telling me these stories about the way he has been treated when traveling to other countries. He said that he was in London a few years ago with his parents and they told some people they were from Germany and then a bunch of people started throwing food at them and dumping beer on them while screaming at them calling the Nazis. He said it was terribly embarrassing and completely unprovoked, and I believe him because he seems like the nicest, happiest guy ever. He said he has found similar reactions in France and other countries.

I found this kind of sad. He was clearly ashamed of his country's past, and its not like he had anything to do with what happened in the 1940s.

Holger spent 3 weeks in China before coming to New Zealand. He said he thought it was amazing that other countries (like China) haven't learned from Germany's mistakes of having a dictatorship with strict censorship of news and restrictions on free speech. He said that in China no one talks about or questions the government and that they only get news from inside China (which is screened by the Chinese government). Kind of scary.