Hate and Reconciliation

It is symbolic that the German and Israeli ambassadors will come together to commemorate Babyn Yar, the graveyard of this city’s Jewish community and others. The nation that committed the Holocaust with sincere repentance will stand together with the nation that suffered it in order to solemnly remember the tragedy and crime that was committed here. I have never felt myself to be so American as in the wake of the September 11 tragedy in my homeland. I cannot really say whether what I want is vengeance or justice (I hope the latter), but as never before I have felt a communion with the Jewish victims whose culture here and in Europe as a whole was lost. At the same time, I am glad that our newspaper has carried words of faith and love from our Muslim brethren, that the crimes in America is no more Islam than the crimes committed here in the name of the master race are the true face of Germany. I am proud that after World War II America could play a modest role in Germany’s return to itself as the land of Goethe, Beethoven, and Mozart away from the nightmare of blood the Nazis led it to. There is also nothing wrong with fundamentalism; after all, I myself grew up with Christian fundamentalists, and the Moslem ones are in themselves not much different. I long ago came to the conclusion that whether we address our God as Jehovah, Allah, or whatever else some prophet might come up with is no reason to fight or kill each other. Trained as a historian, I know how a thousand years ago when they took Jerusalem the Crusaders waded up to their knees in blood and wrote how it was right and just because it was, after all, the blood of infidels. But that was a thousand years ago. One hopes that in that time not only technology but human morality, public and political morality, has changed.

In a time when everyone is casting a suspicious eye at their Muslim brethren, let us above all remember that they are brothers, that their spiritual leaders have cast the terrorists out from those who serve God, and that especially the Crimean Tatars are a people with whom Ukrainian history is intertwined and whom Ukraine has no right to forget. The history of their struggle, bound up with the names of true heroes like Mustafa Dzhemiliov, will give honor not only to the Tatars but to all peoples of this land graced by their presence.