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My (American) grandfather owned a pair of lederhosen. I knew he had gotten them in Germany, but it was twenty years from when I learned about the lederhosen to
by sevensor 8y ago
My (American) grandfather owned a pair of lederhosen. I knew he had gotten them in Germany, but it was twenty years from when I learned about the lederhosen to the time it occurred to me to ask when he had been in Germany. It turns out that the answer was "early 1930s," and that there are droll family stories about how well he passed for a young German. Apparently he'd spent a considerable amount of time there after university, and developed a firm command of the language. I was met with shrugs from my parents' generation when I pointed out how terribly bad that looked. Apparently it was far from unusual. Much like the young English people in the article, he was left-leaning and from a well-to-do family, and had been sent to Germany for perspective.
So this article touched a nerve -- I was already distrubed by the idea of my grandfather blithely roaming around Germany in the early '30s, and by my family's willingness to treat the whole thing as a trifling bit of youthful tourism -- now I'm confronted with the mental image of him heil-ing his way across the country and dropping in to Hitler's favorite tea room.
- jplayer01 8y ago... Germany in the 30's wasn't particularly different from any other European country at the time. It's more disturbing that you think there's anything wrong with visiting what was at the time one of the cultural and scientific centers of the world.
- accoil 8y agoWhy does it look bad?
- sevensor 8y agoBecause going to Germany in the 1930s to soak up the kultur implies some pretty unsavory sympathies. At best, this puts him in the company of a great many other anglophones who allowed themselves to be duped by the regime into thinking that its intentions were basically civilized. It's not quite Wodehouse broadcasting from internment bad, but it doesn't look good.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoEh Germany had the reputation of being into healthy natural lifestyle type stuff; vegetarianism/special diets, exercise and fresh air, homeopathic medicine and so forth. It was kind of the California of Europe in that regard. The Nazis did pick up the clean living aesthetic but it was more about being German than about being fascist