You can’t help but wonder (by Heather)

Write your story based on the most outstanding event that has touched your life over the last month.

You ask what the most outstanding event that has touched my life over the last month is? -- that’s easy. World War II.

I spent 17 days travelling in Germany, like most tourists greatly appreciating the green countryside, the logic of the transportation systems, the antiquity, the food, the prosperity. But also like most foreign tourists, I found myself often lost in wonderment about the impact of World War II on this nation.

People like myself -- having lived in Canada and Australia, where war has hardly touched our cities in the last century -- are stopped in their tracks by the magnitude of the situation. As I mulled it over through those 17 days, I was overwhelmed. So, as I do when overwhelmed, I broke it down.

I discovered that there were actually five hugely bad things that have left me wondering.

Wonderment #1. The rise of the madman

The first of the big questions relates to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. When you look in retrospect at the mess for Germany that one madman and a cadre of passionate followers managed to create -- ¼ of its population dead, 70% of its infrastructure destroyed, its international reputation in tatters -- it boggles the mind how this man managed to take leadership of a nation, for over a decade. How did he manage to get past everybody?

We took a few hours going through the Nuremburg Documentation Centre, located in the Nazi Party Rallying Grounds that Hitler had set aside for the glorification of the chosen country and its Fuhrer. It's a repository (with a good English audioguide) of documents, videos and general information -- about Hitler's childhood and rise to influence, about the massive annual rallies that became the launch pad for Hitler's popularity, about the gradual formation and implementation of policy, about the Nuremburg Trials. As we pored through the museum’s data, we found the facts carefully laid out before us, but the question was undiminished: How did Hitler get past everybody for so long? How is it he wasn’t deposed or assassinated early in the ’30’s when it surely began to be obvious how empty of logic his rhetoric was? How did he maintain the loyalty of his generals, his troops and his countrymen for all those years?

Wonderment #2. The war

The second bad thing leaving a trail of questions behind it is the war itself. In some of the cities we drove through, 90% of the town had been destroyed by Allied bombing. Berlin itself suffered a crushing 70% destruction. Aerial photographs of Nuremburg taken in the aftermath of the bombing show a town pockmarked with adjacent craters of silvery dust, looking more like a lunar landscape than a 20th century city. 20,000,000 Germans were killed in this war.

We saw things that made our hearts ache. The Naval Monument in Kiel is dedicated to the sailors who lost their lives at sea. It features a wall on the right that dispassionately visualises the hundreds and hundreds of vessels lost during the first world war. On the left, the mural shows the thousands of vessels lost during the second world war. The numbers of downed ships, never mind of the sailors lost aboard them, are unimaginable. It is hard to absorb the next room that honours the lives of sailors of other nations also lost in these two wars. It is hard to take in the tributes from nations and naval institutions around the world honouring this museum with its ruthless documentation of what was lost at sea during these wars.

You also can’t help wonder -- how did the Germans get into a war so soon after its previous war? Not more than 20 years after its great losses in World War I, Germany moved into another global battle. How can this have happened?

Wonderment #3. The holocaust

Though all of history humans have shown an unseemly desire to label, scapegoat and destroy those who are Other. But never has that happened on the scale of what was done to Jews and Jewish supporters under Hitler's reign.

I try to get my mind around the numbers. I think of the 3,000 people who died in the Twin Towers bombing, and the outrage that followed in consequence. I think about the impact on the American people -- how their world view was damaged by that incident, shifting America from being a fearful nation to a terrified one.

Multiply those 3,000 people by 10 and we're at the horrific number of lives lost in Krakatoa‘s violent eruption. Multiply it by 100 and think of the unbelievable 230,000 people killed on Boxing Day 2004 by the Indian Ocean tsunami. And we're still magnitudes short of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered in their homes, on the streets and in the voracious death camps machinery. I find I cannot even imagine those numbers, let alone the fevered intentionality that caused them.

I try to get my mind around the people who were murdered on this scale. These are people I can relate to -- teachers, students, doctors, entrepreneurs, housewives, grandfathers, children, philosophers, business people. How could any well of hatred have gone so deep?

How does a nation live with the knowledge that something of that magnitude happened under their very noses?

I think of the thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their families by “well-meaning” government officials in Australia, and how the country has struggled ever since to find a meaningful way to say Sorry for those atrocities. It crosses my mind that perhaps the Germans have something to teach us about the impossibility of saying Sorry, and about dealing with the lessons of the past. I wonder.

Wonderment #4. The aftermath of the war

I spoke with my uncle recently, who talked about his dismal visit to Germany a few years after the war. I try to tell him about same places in 2010. The whole country has an atmosphere of prosperity. There must surely be slums somewhere, but we didn't see a trace of them. The little villages that dot the countryside every few kilometres are pristine. I can’t help comparing with Australia, which I have always felt to be a model of a prosperous nation, and it seems to me that perhaps we fall short of Germany’s mark.

The cities we visited, especially including Berlin, are either fabulously restored or rebuilt with striking new and modern architecture. We walked through castles and cathedrals that have been lovingly restored at obvious great cost. We strolled through areas like Potsdammer Place in Berlin where well-designed, elegant, people-friendly buildings and spaces dominate the landscape.

The questions that linger for me: how and by whom were the decisions made about whether to restore beautiful old buildings or go the simple route and cart them off as rubble? How was a country this demolished, that lost a generation of its young men and all of its merchant Jewish community, able to build itself back so quickly? What did these amazing Germans bring to the party after the war that allowed for these results?

Wonderment #5. The Wall

And as if all this weren’t enough…

…Take a country battered by war and internal breakdown, and give roughly half of it to each of two of the nations who defeated it. These nations bring to the situation diametrically opposing political philosophy and economies. One side favours industry, supports progress, rewards initiative -- and under its wing, half the country begins to prosper. The other builds a massive infrastructure to spy on its citizens, squanders resources, and destroys those who disparage its ideology -- and this half of the country sinks deeper and deeper into a numbing poverty. Lo and behold, citizens from one half begin to leave for the other -- some 3,500,000 of them, in fact. The leaders in the half whose people are abandoning it meet to discuss solutions to the dilemma of the depleting population. Someone stumbles across the obvious solution: put up a wall, fortify it with armed guards and several hundred thousand spies, and keep the wayfarers in. (Truly, does that not make you wonder?)

The rest is history. The Wall, consisting of concrete walls, barb wire and guard towers, went up in August 1961, through and around Berlin, and through the rest of Germany. The Wall came down in November 1989, after the death of hundreds of would-be escapees (and the defection of almost as many wall guards). As the two nations reunited, citizens of East Germany brought their poverty, their shame and their resentment to the post-celebrations. The economic situation copped another blow, as did the German psyche.


I’m in Canada now, enjoying its young cities, oblivion to war and general trouble-free existence (three police cars were threatened by protesters in Toronto last week and it consumed the front pages of all the nation’s newspapers). These kinds of questions aren’t even in the consciousness here; I find they’re rapidly leaving MY consciousness.

Lurking behind it all, of course, is the real question, which is not “How did this happen?”, but rather “Could this happen again?” And: “Could this happen on my watch?”

Considering that 75 years ago most of us would have laughed and said, “Impossible!”, I don’t feel well-positioned to say the same thing now.

And that’s a wonderment.