On this day in 1963 I was in my bowling class at FSU. (It met the PE requirement.) Someone came into the room and announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated. If memory serves me correctly, it was around 11 o'clock. I and everyone else was stunned. I vividly remember and will never forget the moment, the shock, and walking back to my dorm across a silent campus. It’s a moment I recall every November 22nd. There was a palpable sense of loss throughout the campus and the country. It is not something you want to experience. We had not experienced anything like this. Until Martin and Bobby.
I have a vivid memory of that day, though at age 6 I didn't fully grasp the significance. That was probably the event and subsequent speculation about Oswald and Ruby etc., more than any other, that knocked America into the conspiracy/fantasyland it is today. Just imagine, if JFK had lived, if Vietnam had wound down...
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing, I think our generation has a hard time with these moments, even though I am sure there will be more to come in our lifetime.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this I spend an hour reading about the Kennedy family and all the tragedies in their family. Just makes me realize how sometimes you are not aware of the things that happened in the past.
For us it is 9/11 and probably other tragic evens that will follow in the years to come.
I think we talked about it before but kinda brings me back to the statement that when big things happen we just do not forget about our whereabouts that day. Can be a personal tragic or something bigger like the president's assassination.
Ich bin ein Berliner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ha9GJwlus8
DeleteCarolin, I visited Berlin in 1964, 25 years before the wall fell. I went to East Berlin. You know how sometime in movies the opening scene will move from black and white to color? That is my memory of going from the west to the east, but it was from color to black and white. It was truly how I would visualize the world of Huxley’s 1984. I can still see the ever-present soldiers with those machine guns that have an open stock; almost feel their sinister presence. And the emptiness and lifelessness and bleakness was overwhelming. Such a stark contrast to mornings on the Kurfürstendamm, having a hard roll with your delicious butter and a cup of strong flavorful German coffee, watching happy people bustling by. I spent 6 weeks working at a hotel in Schlangenbad, going to winefests at villages along the Rhine. I developed an abiding affection for the Germans at these local winefests, the happy ones that drink your wonderful beer, and laugh and sing into the night (not the skinheads though). If you haven’t seen the movie The Lives of Others, you should. Alles Gute.
While we're on the subject of German-American relations, may I recommend one of the better books I've read lately? It's by American philosopher Susan Neiman, who works and lives in Berlin:
ReplyDeleteLearning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
by Susan Neiman
As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories.
Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41940427-learning-from-the-germans
And one more thing: my maternal lineage is German. My mother's emigre grandparents were Ostertogs, re-dubbed "Easterday" at Ellis Island.
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