Munich ignores dark history

MUNICH, Germany -- Walk downtown to Bloomington's Courthouse, and you'll find war memorials that commemorate local soldiers who have fallen in the most prominent of our country's wars. Our city prides itself on the locals who gave their lives in defense of a great and noble cause: the defense of our country and the freedom of its inhabitants. \nIn America, many of us look upon World War II as the "good war" -- a war in which we can all take pride. Those of us who had relatives in the country at the time can point to grandfathers who served in the Armed Forces and grandmothers who worked as civil defense volunteers. The war cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, but, unlike almost every other war in our history, practically everyone agrees on its justice.\nWalk downtown to the center of Munich, and you'll be hard pressed to find any such memorials. You can get a liter in the Hofbrauhas, one of the most famous beer halls in Germany -- yet no plaque exists telling you Hitler made his earliest speeches there. Those speeches won over many of the core followers of the anti-Semitic Nazi ideals. You can hear recitals in the local university's school of music, yet nothing in the building will tell you that the Nazi party built it as its headquarters.\nRather than criticizing and analyzing the factors that led to the rise of such a terrible regime, the city seems to ignore talk of Hitler's rise to power. Perhaps this is reasonable -- is it really fair to continually pound into the heads of today's Germans the failures of their ancestors? After all, their grandparents' mistakes led to the Holocaust, not those of today's Germans.\nBut should the aim of history -- and the monuments that present it -- be to put our minds at ease or to challenge our preconceptions and better prepare us for making decisions in the modern world?\nRecognizing that one's forefathers made terrible mistakes causes great pain. But if one does not understand the past, one can never act justly in the present. No one can hold today's Germans responsible for the Holocaust. Yet if they do not understand the dramatic mistakes their ancestors made in allowing the supremacy of the Nazi regime, they can never truly combat racism in the modern world.\nJust two weeks ago in Saxony's parliament, German legislators from a far-right party walked out of a moment of silence held for victims of aggression. While Saxony has one of the strongest Neo-Nazi movements in Germany, the problem goes beyond extremists. Indeed, many Germans today can still not recognize the true causes and nature of genocide. \nAccording to a Feb. 1 Reuters News Service article, a December poll by Bielefeld University found that more than half of the German population equates Israeli army policies with those of the Nazi regime. Israel might have killed innocent civilians in the pursuit of terrorists, but it has never, in any way, engendered the type of mass murder enacted by the Third Reich.\nIf modern Germans cannot understand the difference between policies that seek to protect civilians and those that seek to eliminate an entire ethnicity, how can the world expect them to find solutions to such ills as genocide in Darfur? With an incomplete presentation of their history, Germans cannot look to their past for solutions to the problems that plague both their country and the world at large. \nHistory should not serve as a Prozac to cure our ideological worries, but should instead function as a tool we use to solve the problems of the modern world. If Germany wishes to truly solve world problems, cities such as Munich must first present their whole past, no matter the pain of the exposition.