View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

When you read this, the celebration of Christmas may be over and you are maybe looking back over the old year. So, I could write about this year and how it was for us; but I sometimes wonder if I burden you with my grief. And if I were to write about this last year, that would be the overriding theme. Not that we didn’t have moments of joy, but most days were hard.

This being the last few days of 2023 means that a new year is just around the corner. And my wishes for all of us for 2024 are that we all could live in peace. Peace within our souls, but also peace in the world. The whole world.

When I taught German, which I did most of my working life, my goal was world peace. That might seem like a far-reaching and presumptuous goal, but I firmly believe that understanding another culture leads to more tolerance and compassion for others. A language is more than words and grammar; a language is embedded in the culture of the people who speak it.

I was the unpopular teacher who tried to get my students to think and even dream in a foreign language and by their third year of learning German, my students were able to communicate pretty well. I then decided they were ready to tackle the most complicated and frightening topic of any person, foreign or native, who speaks German and loves the German culture: How could the Holocaust happen? How could the nation that produced Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Kant, descend into the abyss that was the era of Hitler?

The philosophy of Hitler Germany was based on the premise that Germans were a superior race and that foreigners who didn’t look like them were vermin and should really be eradicated, because they were the reason for everything that had gone wrong in Germany from the lousy economy to the threat of the communist Soviet Union.

This sounds preposterous to the average Midwesterner. Therefore, I started my lesson on the Holocaust with a time of introspection. We discussed our own prejudices. Did we really have prejudices, we, secure in our own groups? We, who were kind and tolerant? Surprisingly, we all did. Even I, their teacher did. We talked about how we felt towards LBGTQ+ people and foreigners with different languages, different tastes and different color skin. People who were handicapped and even the elderly. And people who worshipped differently than we did. Discussions ran lively and loud. Emotions ran high. Everyone had a story. They hardly noticed they were speaking German. Their final project was to make a poster with an original poem against prejudice. They also had to memorize the famous poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, a pastor who was an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime and spent seven years in concentration camps.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

After our prejudice unit, we went on to learn about the propaganda and censorship which led to the unimaginably cruel atrocities of the Nazi era. We also learned about the resistance groups within Germany and its occupied territories and the bloody reprisals inflicted on the resistance fighters and their families. Which all lead to the question of what we would do if we were living during this horrible time.

Hopefully, my students came away with some knowledge of how quickly chaos and terror could descend on a civilized country like Germany. They would ask me how such a thing could be prevented and I would always remind them that the people of Germany had the choice at some point. Because Hitler had been elected legally. But most Germans had been tired of politics, so they had chosen not to vote.

May this be a year when we all work for peace by transcending our own comfortable group.