Last year the Iranian president Mahmood Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to our chancellor Ms Merkel. He wrote that the German people should regain their national pride and no longer allow others to make them feel guilty for something that happened more than 60 years ago.
Many Americans tell us Germans, when we mention the historical obligations being put on us because of the "Holocaust", that we should get over this collective guilt feeling.
The Iranian president and everybody else who tries to help us to overcome our
"guilt-feelings" does not understand our collective German soul.
Not at all.
We revel in our "Holocaust-guilt". We enjoy it, we love it. It´s our shield and our protection.
Because you see, our "Holocaust-guilt-feelings" are no real guilt-feelings at all.
We do not feel guilty. How can we? The events occurred more than 60 years ago.
It´s a vicarious guilt-complex.
By taking upon us the "Holocaust-guilt", we just point the finger at our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
And now we can freely feel good about ourselves.
We are righteous, because now support the state of Israel, Jewish state, unconditionally, even with nuclear capable submarines.
When Israelis commits war-crimes against Palestinians, Egyptians and Lebanese, while we partly finance and arm them, we do not have to feel guilty, because our "Holocaust-guilt" gives us historical obligations.
When we reprint cartoons demonizing all Muslims as terrorists and denigrating their religion all over the German media-landscape, we do not have to feel guilty, because we do not demonize Jews as the Nazi propaganda paper "der Stürmer" did.
When we print day, after day, after day anti-Muslim articles or show anti-Muslim news-coverage, we do not have to feel guilty, a little bit of racism is nothing to worry about, as long as the desecrated victims are not Jewish.
When we ban religious Muslimas to work as teachers in Germany and some parts even ban them from working in any public offices, we are still very good and ethical people, because we are no anti-Semites.
Those Muslimas, we say, would give their students or the public they come in contact with, a bad example.
And yes, how dare a Muslima pursuit a higher education and get a desk job or even become a teacher. What a bad example for Muslim girls.
We Germans need those Muslimas to scrub the floors of the schools, vacuum the carpets in public offices and scrub the toilets. Hijab is in Germany the common uniform for the cleaning brigades.
We have nothing against a small, tiny nuclear attack on Iran.
Evaporating a few thousands and burning some hundred thousands alive, because we don´t like their government, we don´t see as a problem, for we are so morally upstanding people, that we throw "Holocaust-deniers" in jail for years.
Right after WWII, what happened during this war, was more or less a taboo-subject for most Germans. It was not before the post-war generation had come to maturity and some of them into powerful positions and we could point our fingers at an earlier generation, that the "Holocaust" became a public matter of attention.
The money we pay now in cpmpensations is sctually small change for the pay-offs we derrive from this pseudo-"collective guilt-trip".
Now the past, we cannot really feel guilty about, is our shield against what we actually should feel guilty about in the present.
"The Holocaust" is for us present-day Germans such a convenient excuse for our own moral and ethical cowardice and a cover-up for our modern-day racism, that if it hadn´t happened, it would have needed to be invented.
