A fond farewell to my old friend from the Hitler Youth
Ha! Got your attention with that one, I'll bet. It IS an interesting story.
"Onkel Alfred" was one of the closest friends of my wife's family. He once ran a bicycle factory in the rural German northwest, and was respected by all as a hardworking, very fair boss. As manager, he brought in great profits for the family that owned the bicycle factory, and was well-liked by the people who worked under him. My wife even worked there for a while as a teenager.
I only met him after I met my wife, of course, and I really adored this guy, aware, friendly and non-judgemental, especially by German standards. A true "liberal" in the classic sense of the word. His wife is every bit the same. She survives him.
He once told me about his war experience. Too young to serve in the military, he was "encouraged" to join the Hitler Youth, as were all kids in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He said the indoctrination was all-pervasive, and they had you believing the wonderfulness of being a German and the master race and the whole nine yards they fed you. He said it was a brain-washing so complete, there was no way you could ever imagine (as a 10 year old) that you were being fed complete bullshit.
From what Uncle Alfred told me about his childhood, I drew parallels to many parts of America today, where I meet young people with Fox-watching, teabagging parents, and I understand how it is that the 47% is still very much out there.
Many of them live in areas much like Onkel Alfred's part of rural Germany, and although they have a choice of media (where Nazi-era Germans did not), they do not exercise that choice. Their kids get indoctrinated from the moment they can talk, and many of them probably think that teachers that want to teach them evolution instead of creationism are doing the devil's work. Get to them young enough and they'll believe anything.
This doesn't pertain only to our Republicans. No rational seventeen year old kid would strap a bomb full of nails to his chest, walk into a crowded marketplace and detonate it. Remove his rationality, convince him (and convince him absolutely) that he'll be impregnating the first of his 72 virgins by that afternoon, and he'll do anything you want.
Onkel Alfred was lucky enough to escape his intended fate and become a rational, kind, dedicated person. Too many did not. That goes as well for the blinded children who attend rallies for Teabaggers, abuse other children because it's either encouraged or not discouraged by their parents and teachers, and think they know all there is to know about the world because they heard it from some perverted pastor whose drivel their parents told them from birth was the word of "God." How many American children will grow up to be like the Hitler Youth Onkel Alfred was, and never get out from under from the yoke of ignorance and hate from which Onkel Alfred managed to so successfully free himself? Alfred worried about that a lot. He worried about the parallels between today's radical right in America and the ones who brainwashed him as a ten year old. It was a subject that troubled him terribly.
I spent many long afternoons up in Northwestern Germany, in the tiny towns of Quackenbrück and Löningen, slowly downing tea and afternoon cake with Onkel Alfred, going over our very different life experiences, his of course stretching far longer than my own. And yet, we had so very much in common in the way we viewed the world. He had had to travel a much longer path to get there than I ever did.
He passed away in his sleep yesterday. I'll miss those afternoons. I'll miss him.
Auf wiedersehen, alter Freund.
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You tell it so very well. I am moved...
Safe passage to your dear Onkel Alfred. He has earned, more than earned, his rest.
