Kraut Wurst or Worst

Via Instapundit an interesting article on German attitudes about the Holocaust and Jews. Instapundit pulls this quote:

Every observer of Germany knows that its officially prescribed attitude of perpetual atonement over the Holocaust coexists with an anti-Semitism that’s been on the rise for decades. These two phenomena are unquestionably linked – which is to say that the hostility of many Germans toward Jews is rooted in their awareness of their grandfathers’ or great-grandfathers’ wartime actions, their awareness that they’re expected to spend their lives professing guilt for these actions, and the fact that, in a country full of reminders of those actions, it’s impossible to escape this awareness.

How, after all, can a country that did what Germany did in the 1940s be psychologically healthy only three generations later? Henryk M. Broder, the German Jewish writer, put it this way in 1986: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” It’s become a cliché that Germans love dead Jews – they just don’t care for living ones.
Six years ago I reviewed Tuvia Tenenbom’s eye-opening book I Sleep in Hitler’s Room: An American Jew Visits Germany. Tenenbom, I wrote, was “constantly exposed to rote expressions of sympathy for the victims of Auschwitz – and rote expressions of rage over Israel’s supposedly deplorable treatment of the Palestinians.”

 Obviously, Germans enjoy equating Israel with Nazi Germany because it helps relieve their historical guilt. Germans will tell you that they’re resolved never to let “that” happen again – but they’ve managed to convince themselves that the group most in danger of being subjected to “that” in today’s Europe isn’t the Jews but the Muslims. Therefore, the best way to atone for what their ancestors did to Jews is to kowtow to Islam.

One  of the tragedies of Hitler is that he will forever be the most famous German. Not Einstein, not Beethoven.

[Yeah that's the tragic bit-Ed]

I said 'one of', Motherfucker.

Germany will always be best known for the Second World War rather than its work in industry, art and science; a nation that has done much to advance the lot of man.

There's this headline too:

Germany Should Take Pride in Its WWII Soldiers, Far-right Candidate Says
A founder of the Alternative for Germany party, Alexander Gauland, says Germans should be proud of the Wehrmacht the way the French are of Napoleon

Quite right.

Every military in the world studies the Germans, from the Barbarians to the Landskenchts, to Frederich, to Moltke, to Guderian.

That includes the Israelis by the way.

Of course, a good part of A Line through the Desert takes place in Germany. Jake Bloom encounters arrogant socialists, cynical women, price gauging cabbies; there's even a holocaust reference or two. Sometimes we feel we were too tough on the krauts.