jkirk wrote:
...
it seems they caused a lot of stuff. :lol:
Yes - we are quite a busy nation, aren't we?
;-)
Without us Germans there would not be the UK as we know it today, there would not be the USA as we know them today (IIRC nearly the half of the inhabitants immigrated from Germany around the time the US was founded), there would have been no landing on the moon in 1969...
and:
there would have been no soccer world championship in Germany this year...
:-D
We have an (ironic) saying here:
If one works, mistakes can occur.
If one works a lot, a lot of mistakes can occur.
If one doesn't work at all, he can't make any mistakes.
If one doesn't make any mistakes, he deserves a gratification...
As we Germans work a lot, we already made a lot of mistakes.
And we made the biggest mistake humans can make:
We allowed that an Austrian mislead the majority of our nation to behave like beasts and start off a war with nearly the whole world, which finally costed about 60 million (!) lives.
This number alone makes me shiver - I must not start to imagine, what *personal fate* each of these numbers had - or I would go mad.
I feel ashamed and somehow guilty for what happened in the name of our nation, although I was born 12 years after the end of WW II.
I was born in Magdeburg, East Germany - and my parents took flight with me from the communists to Cologne, West Germany, when I was just 2 years old.
I had the big luck to grow up in the West, but since I was 5 years old we visited our relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins) as far as possible at least once a year (they had an amnesty in the German Democratic Republic around that time for all those that flew from them - without this amnesty you had the risk as a refugee to get arrested and sentenced when coming back for a visit).
I could not go and visit my Granny after school as my schoolmates could do - if I wanted to visit her, I had to tell her about two maonths before.
Then she had to go to the local police station in Magdeburg and make an application for my entry visum.
About four weeks after that she got the entry permit for me (max. 30 days per year) from their authorities and sent it over to us.
Then I could buy my ticket and get on the train.
At the border the train had to stop for one hour for the controls.
Herefor the border guards with their maschine guns in aiming position entered the train and locked the doors behind them (really nice feeling), while guard dogs ran up and down under the train with more border guards accompanying them on both sides of the train.
They looked everywhere - under the seats, in the luggage, they even opened the wall- and ceiling-coverings to see whats behind them.
And oh yes, I was forced to exchange 25 DM (west currency, the first years they took just 13 DM)
per day at an rate of 1:1 to MDN (east German currency), while the official exchange rate was about 1 (DM) : 10 (MDN); even when one was a poor student or unemployed.
This was part of the price
*I* had to pay for crimes others committed against humanity between 1933 and 1945...
EDIT:
I would like to add that in my point of view "the price I had to pay" is nothing compared to what the victims of WW II had to suffer.
So the price is O.K. for me.
EDIT 2:
Hmmmmm - yesterday - when I wrote this - I was not aware whate date we have.
But when I sat at home watching the news last night, they said it was the 62. anniversary of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg's assault on Hitler...
Makes me think that I wrote such words on such a day without being aware of it...
:roll:
