I am a teenager in germany at the prime of my youth. Please don't think of me as "German". I don't like that category. German identity is very difficult to understand. Can I be proud of being German? Pride is difficult to grasp. What does national identity mean these days anyway? Yes I like my country - I like Goethe, Bauhaus, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Frankfurt School, I like Berlin now and in the 1920s and I like Dada, Fassbinder... I like the German stereotypes because they are often true (it is very clean and we do recycle a lot), I like the fact that we are a social democracy! I like our literature and movies. Germany is great place to grow up and develop a modern free mind.
Because I am jewish its easy for me to deal with the past as I don't need to doubt my grandparents ideology and what they might have done. The German past is still omnipresent and is still haunting us but we don't want anything to with it anymore which is a difficult dichtonomy - one the one side there is a public that is sick and tired of hearing the stories about the holocaust again and again, being constantly reminded of what their "heimat" once was and on the other side it is important to accept that burden, to know what happened and to never forget it. Still I dont want to be associated with old cliches and national pride. Its silly for any country and as I believe still one of the major reasons for wars all
around the world.
There is this song I heard on American Pop Idol "I am proud to be an american well at least i know I am free..." I don't know why but it gave me goosebumps....?
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