How can good Germans consistently look away when they should be looking closer? Is it human stupidity, evil, or susceptibility to eschatological religions, from Christianity, homeopathy, to FC St. Pauli, who often blinds them? As left-wing aesthetes – bored with their girlish idealism – do they secretly love crime? Are you afraid of missing an important party? Let’s see.
The astute Lion Feuchtwanger, for example, was not for a second interested in the millions of Gulag victims when he visited Moscow in Stalinism’s worst year, 1937, but rather in the diarrhea they suffered. When RAF terrorists shot down democratically elected politicians, high-ranking lawyers and disengaged security guards in the 1970s, German high school and university students felt that these sacrifices were necessary in a fair fight, I often heard them say that. And in a fairly steady feature section in a popular daily newspaper, a hymn to New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdaniprinted in which his pro-Palestinian hatred of Israel was downplayed and considered a great deed.
