Take Hitler Avenue Until You Come to Goebbels Way

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Today as I was walking my dog, I bumped into my neighbor Tobias, an Austrian-born architect, who has lived in and loved America for many years.

Although conversations about the Charlottesville demonstrations have subsided now that we have the Hurricane Harvey clean-up, the DACA expiration, Hurricane Irma, and nuclear war with Korea to concern us, Tobias was still trying to make sense of the Civil War monuments debate.

“I just don’t get why these monument enthusiasts are still clinging to the past. Tell me, have you ever visited Germany?” Tobias asked.

“Once,” I said.
“And did you see the Hitler monument?”
“No!”

“Of course, you didn’t. There isn’t one. A. the Germans lost the war. And B. no one wants to take a walk through a park and be reminded of Hitler. But what did the Germans do? They built The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. They built The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism. There for everyone to see, to think about, to contemplate what they and their countrymen did.”

Tobias’ riff got me thinking about my trip to Berlin and my surprise while walking in the Jewish Quarter when I stepped on what are called stolperstein, “stumbling stones,” little bricks imbedded into the sidewalks at slight angles which forces one to stop and see what’s underfoot.

The stones read, “Here lived” following by the name of the person who lived in the adjacent apartment and the dates of that person’s deportation and extermination and as well as the name of concentration camp where that person perished. And the stones don’t say the person “died,” the stones say that the person was “murdered.”

No whitewashing history.

The Germans confronted their history, admitted the unimaginable horror they inflicted upon their own citizens and upon the world and built tens of thousands of these mini-monuments, stumbling stones, to make sure what happened on their soil remains fresh in everyone’s mind.

That’s a big difference between how Germany dealt with their participation in World War II and how so many fans of Confederate monuments refuse to face the reality of the Civil War.

First off, the Confederacy lost.

And we shouldn’t build monuments to losers. Otherwise, there would be a statue to the 1962 New York Mets.

Nor do sane, compassionate countries build monuments to leaders who went to war against their own people and killed hundreds of thousands or millions of them.

I guarantee you that there is no Saddam Hussein strip mall in Baghdad. No Pol Pot amusement park in Bangkok. No Vlad the Impaler bowling alley in Bucharest. Or monuments to those mass murderers.

Men who rose up against their own people and slaughtered them should be remembered in history books for the terror they unleashed upon their fellow citizens, not glorified in public spaces. They should not be honored with larger-than-life statues that praise their bloody and treasonous actions and by their granite presence be blessed with permanent, heroic status.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s in Texas and never understood why so many of city’s schools were named after Confederate heroes. As late as 1962, the Houston Independent School District built a new school in a comfortable, white suburb and named it Robert E. Lee High School.

Ninety-seven years after the Civil War ended!

As a student at the University of Texas – Austin in the early to mid-1970s, I am pretty sure we had more statues of confederate heroes (4) on campus than we had African American professors.

I came to believe that the confederate statues sprinkled across campus were meant to inspire awe, that these men were our Greek gods; deities that would one day return and rule our world.

The South would, indeed, rise again.

And perhaps that is how the monument enthusiasts see it. Perhaps they long to live in a world like the pre-Civil War South. A world where they will be all-powerful. Where they can own people. Where their white lives will matter more than they do now.

The Third Reich and the Confederacy both lost their wars.

But the German people acknowledged their defeat and built monuments honoring those who lost their lives, they did not commemorate the tyrants who gave orders that lead millions to their deaths.

That’s why if you visit Germany you’ll never hear anyone say, “Take Hitler Avenue until you come to Goebbels Way. That will lead you into the Himmler Highway, and take it until you see the exit for Goring Gardens.”

For the Germans, the war is over.

For the Confederate monument enthusiasts, their war continues…

Apparently, with no end in sight.

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