Good Morning all,

I am a bit helpless about what I should write in an Open Thread. (I defnitely think I shouldn't write at all here, and as I often do in my life I go against my own instincts just to try to be nice and help someone out). Please go ahead and share what you find important or enjoy to share. I could offer some "Wagner" music for JtC, but ... ... I don't enjoy that.

I thought I show you some article about how a German and an American disagree about the image they have about Germany. Yeah, well, what else is new. But I never get used to it. So here it goes: The American is Roger Cohen (born 1955), today a columnist of the NYT. I admit I don't read the NYT unless some diary points to a specific story in there. Here is a short description:

Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting foreign editor on Sept. 11, 2001, and foreign editor six months later.
Since 2004, he has written a column for The International New York Times, formerly known as The International Herald Tribune. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times. His columns appear every Tuesday and Friday.
Raised in South Africa and England, he is a naturalized American.

The German is Jochen Bittner (born 1973)

Since 2001 he has been Political Editor at the Time. From 2007 to 2011 he was its European and NATO correspondent in Brussels. Since fall of 2013, he writes as guest author for The International New York Times. [1] Jochen Bittner is also editor at the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit", for the online edition.

I don't know any of the two and just ran in the article both of them wrote together as a correspondence exchange between them. One should not forget that both are of different generations aside from being from different "planets". I searched around a bit of Bittner's writings and wouldn't say that I am really sure if I would agree with him on a couple of issues, but that's just the impression after gazing around for an hour or so on the bit I saw online.

But in this specific exchange, I believe he shows the difference in perception of a younger generation of Germans versus the one of the elderly American Roger Cohen, who is responding graciously and what I consider in a predictable manner as well. I found the article interesting as it touches many question I asked myself often and which affect imo today's problems of Germany's role (including the Ukraine and Palestina and Syria conflicts) more than I would like to see.

Let's start with Jochen Bittner's part:
Is Germany complacent? - Yes, claims american journalist and columnist of the "New York Times", Roger Cohen. Jochen Bittner, editor of DIE ZEIT, disagrees. - A correspondence - By Jochen Bittner und Roger Cohen

Dear Roger Cohen,

I felt I had to write to you because we need to hear your opinion – and that's still the case. Since your time as the Berlin correspondent for the New York Times at the turn of the century, you have been the most important overseas voice on Germany. .... With your view from the outside looking in you've sounded out the depths of Germany's strengths and weaknesses, which we, blinded by habit, have struggled to recognize.
...
However, I have recently been more astonished at you than you yourself have been at Germany - at least that’s how it feels. Is it possible that the courage to give your unequivocal opinion has since fallen into stereotypes? Or is there something else in it, perhaps a historical disappointment? A projection? In any case the picture you paint of Germany and the reality which I see, are drifting further and further apart.
...
When reading your analysis of Germany from the last few months, I get the underlying impression that you see a kind of uneasy 'wannabe' hegemon which, irritatingly, has emerged from America’s tutelage at such a premature stage. Back in July you wrote that after reunification and the introduction of the Euro, America believed it could unload its "European burden." You state that instead of binding Germany to Europe, the euro has led to "German diktats of discipline, predictability and austerity." All of a sudden countries with a "more flexible Mediterranean culture" were tied down. You conclude by saying, "German methods are good for Germans. But if Berlin now wants all Europeans to follow those methods, the Europe that offered postwar Germany a path to salvation will break apart."
...
In August you added some more historical weight to your argument: "There is the euro. Then there is war and peace and that other kind of debt." You then go on to say that the Holocaust is Germany's deepest debt which can never be repaid.

...
Finally, in light of the VW scandal we learn in September that "there is something peculiarly German about the chasm between professed moral rectitude and reckless wrongdoing, between high culture and low conduct."
...
I agree with you on a lot of issues ....A full-blooded north-south conflict in Europe started by the Eurozone crisis, which created two closed narratives, in which each side is solely to blame for the misery.
...
The "German Question", I think, was resolved 25 years ago. There is also, in my opinion, no German diktat.
...
Given that leading politicians are failing to publicly bridge the resulting divide across Europe, do we journalists not then have an even bigger responsibility to prevent resentment spreading?
...
But it seems to me as if you don't think it's really worth the effort. What, for example, did the Holocaust lose during the Euro crisis? Do you really want to make up for historic guilt with Euros?
...
I also find it disconcerting to judge a nation's character based on Volkswagen's foul deception. Personally, it wouldn't occur to me to consider Facebook happily passing on users' data to the US secret services as a symbol of America forgetting her own constitutional rights.
...
Playing the role of the hegemon is a thankless task. No-one knows this better than America. Therefore, I have one sincere request: use your insightful views to help us find new ways of thinking rather than recycling the old ones.

Best wishes,
Jochen Bittner

And here excerpts of Roger Cohen's response:

Dear Jochen Bittner,

Thank you for your letter and the kind words with which it begins. My years in Germany were rich and rewarding. I arrived in Berlin in 1998, before the capital had returned there from Bonn, and left in 2001.
...
The openness of Germans, including politicians like Joschka Fischer and Otto Schilly, was astonishing. They revealed themselves to me in a way I had seldom encountered outside war zones, where all the protective layers of personality are stripped away. If the true subject of any foreign correspondent is the soul of the country they cover, Germany uncovered its own with a frankness that sometimes took my breath away.
...
Another woman told me, deadpan, that in every German family there is a locked drawer, and that drawer contains a shameful secret. In such ways, I came to understand Germany’s confrontation with its past, of which the return to Berlin was of course an important element. I came to admire the honesty and courage of this reckoning with the collapse of an entire civilization.
...
This intense self-interrogation was uplifting, at least to me. It suggested how, after the Holocaust, Germans saw the conduct of their lives and of their nation with a particular moral rigor.
...
How better, after all, to atone for the destruction of Europe and the near annihilation of European Jewry than through European unity?
...
If I have experienced a "historical disappointment," as you put it, it is that this Germany I knew seems to me have faded. The self-interrogation that brought out the best has given way to forms of complacency, even amnesia.
....
That is inevitable, you will tell me: the years pass, new generations arrive, they cannot – and perhaps should not – feel the past with the same acuity.
...
Germans no longer worry about their right to be proud or their sense of being a normal nation
....
Germans are enjoying being Europe’s most prosperous and powerful nation... Blithe, device-obsessed self-regard has come to normal Germany, too. It can give lessons. Look at its mighty economy. It’s earned the right!
...
Perhaps that is a happy ending. Certainly it is an unexpected one. Much of the post-war energy of the United States and other European states went into trying to ensure that the German dominance of today would not reoccur.
...
Personally I am at ease with German power. ... But I think a special German debt endures that applies to European unity and the nation’s conduct as a whole.
...
The Greek crisis and the euro crisis as a whole have been a test of this German commitment to Europe. The results have been mixed.
...
The euro was a political creation above all. Germany’s deepest obligation, in my view, is to that political creation, which cannot be nickel-and-dimed. There is no such thing as inherited guilt. But there is inherited responsibility. German leadership cannot be divorced from Germany’s past. The shame cannot be effaced.
....
Its close alliance with Poland, built over terrible wounds, is inspiring. But it has changed since I was there in ways that sometimes trouble me.
...
Perhaps I’ve changed, too. If Germany with the years distances itself from its great 20th-century crime, I feel it closer as I grow older. I see its reverberations in my own family... [personal family and friends memories about the effects of the holocaust on them follow here]
...
The mystery that struck me with such force when, as Berlin correspondent, I first visited Buchenwald and saw its proximity to Goethe’s home town remains: How the nation of Goethe and Schiller and Kant and Beethoven could fall for such garbage and wreak such horror. But it did. And so I stand by the phrase you cite: "There is something peculiarly German about the chasm between professed moral rectitude and reckless wrongdoing, between high culture and low conduct."

Exchanges like this one have always interested me, because I find the diverging view points repeated in many other conflicts between the "sinner" nation, ethnic minority or majority or tribe and the "victim" nation, ethnic minority or tribe repeated over and over again. And how those tensions pass from one generation to the next and how they change, recur and generate new conflicts of the same sort. Exactly what everyone is trying to avoid but never succeed in.The opposite is happening. New atrocities surface again.

Roger Cohen says, there is no inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility. I think he means the responsibility to not engage in the same evils your forefathers or anchestors or parents have committed. "Never again" is the guiding code of conduct we are supposed to adhere to. Yet rarely it happens. If you mention this code of conduct, usually the discussion goes around the appropriateness to compare one evil with another, making sure to be reasonable and not compare the atrocities committed on a couple of thousand people with the atrocities on a couple of million people or a couple of hundred people. Yet for the victims the atrocities their fathers or anchestors had to endure is all the same, independent of how many had to endure them.

The native American's genocide and exploitation and killing of their culture is to them as painful and grave and the African slaves exploitation in the US or the outcry of slaughtered and murdered Tutsis or Hutus or other atrocities based on interethnic domination and enslavement or exploitatin among African tribes. What is caused by racism or tribalism or fanatism among same ethnic, but different religious groups, it all ends up with the victims crying out for justice, reparation and the perpetrators hesitance to admit their "sins", feeling overwhelmed with guilt (you guys here quite often self-flaggellate about the US political war crimes too) and their feeling of being themselves exploited by the insistence of the victims, who will never stop asking for righting a wrong that has been done decades or centuries ago.

So, my question is, how do you escape that cycle? It's one of the subjects I really like to study and read about. I have accumulated many books over the years which supposedly tackle this issue. They are the ones I want to read first. Tribalism is a phenomenon I like to understand, where it comes from, in how far people need it, what kind of conflicts they generate, if tribalism or racism is inate etc.

I have three and a half decades behind me, in which I couldn't educate myself and feel I have a lot of catch up with. So, I will be reading about issues that all are historical or at least happened during the last five decades, issues many of you know in detail. They are all issues that are not news related. So, I don't feel that what I would like to read is something I could use to contribute to this forum, as I risk to tell you what we call in German "Schnee von gestern" (news from yesterday).

I mention my reading priorities here, because I was asked by DonMidwest several times, which books are on my reading list and I just want to apologize that what interests me more is not ideology, economy or news related. I hope he forgives me for my head being oriented towards other issues.

With regards to the letter exchange, I have to say that Bittner himself is in no way "a left leaning journalist" of the kind I would like to see in Germany. So if Cohen sees in him a young German who has amnesia about Germany's past or is not willing anymore to consider some of his arguments, it's not meant to be seen as a "progressive" sign. There are not many voices that would be courageous enough to strongly support the rights of the Palestinians (as Max Blumenthal has rightfully complained about), the only ones left would be the German voices from the left, but I don't think they are strong enough to even be heard over here in the US or they simply don't exist. So, that's where my discouragement and disillusionment comes from thinking about Germany.

Ok, so I can't let you go without some song. Here is one, I sang with compassion when I was young. I know it's out of your world probably, but I guess you have just to bare with me. I still like "the other Cohen" ...This I think was the version I listened to.
[video:https://youtu.be/cZI6EdnvH-8]
Then you might like this too:
[video:https://youtu.be/TNvRyzUPm-Y]
And this I think is hilarious:
[video:https://youtu.be/wMhgQOdMdJ4]
An Honest Cohen.